Parker Solar Probe, Take the Solar Plunge Options

[ljk4-1]

Any serious plans to send a probe into the Sun to explore its depths as far as possible?

What would help a probe last as long as it could and how deep could it get?

Could it even radio or laser out any data?

What about a Sun skimmer?

[kwan3217]

I recall a sci fi story from long ago about a manned station and manned boats on the surface of the sun. The three main obstacles to operating on the surface of the sun are:

1) intense heat
2) no solid surface
3) 32G surface gravity

The solutions are as follows

1) Carry a large supply of carbon, and pump it out of the surface of your platform. The carbon vaporizes and carries off the heat. Use carbon since it has the highest known melting and vaporization temperature of any substance. It acts like an ablative heat shield, or as the story described it, the bottom layer of a water drop in a hot pan.
2) Carry a big particle accelerator torus, and put a bunch of plasma in it and run it around the right direction such that it generates a magnetic field counter to the sun's magnetic field. If it is strong enough and controlled well enough, it will support the platform
3) Put this torus on the roof of the platform. Run the torus fast enough that through special relativity it gains enough mass to generate a 31G field in the up direction.

In the story, the mission of the platform and boats was to induce precisely controlled solar flares which would impact the atmosphere of the Earth, and in this manner they could control the weather. There was a vast representative democracy back on Earth, the Weather Congress, to decide what weather to have. There was a vast scientific institue, the Weather Advisors, to figure out how to implement the decisions of the Weather Congress. And there was the Weather Service, manning the base and boats on the sun, to carry out the plans of the Weather Advisors.

Now I know that there are dozens of reasons why the solutions proposed could not work (Where does all the carbon come from? What is the power source? What about tides from the gravity generator? Can you really use a plasma torus like that? The photosphere is hundreds of miles thick. Solar flares can't really influence Earth's weather that much. Even an enormous nuke is a mere sparkler on the sun, flares can't be induced.) but it is still interesting that someone actually considered a solution for landing on the sun which doesn't involve landing at night.

[tty]

1) Carry a large supply of carbon, and pump it out of the surface of your platform. The carbon vaporizes and carries off the heat. Use carbon since it has the highest known melting and vaporization temperature of any substance. It acts like an ablative heat shield, or as the story described it, the bottom layer of a water drop in a hot pan.

I wonder if the use of coal to absorb the heat has something to with an idea Freeman Dyson came up with when he was working on the Orion nuclear propulsion project. The problem was how to test the concept without breaking the test ban since the test needed to be done in vacuum.
Dyson’s idea was to do the test indoors in a very large vacuum chamber. This would be partly filled with hundreds of tons of charcoal blocks suspended on wires. The explosion would of course turn the charcoal into fine dust which would then absorb the energy from the explosion by being converted into gas. The pressure wouldn’t be excessive since most of the volume was originally vacuum and the energy would transfer relatively slowly to the chamber walls so they wouldn’t melt, at least not much. According to Dyson’s calculations the whole thing would only work for quite small nuclear explosions, up to a few tenths of a kiloton, but that was the range they were interested in for the Orion project anyway.

The idea apparently interested the AEC as well when they realized that if done in an underground cavity it would both prevent the escape of nuclear debris to the atmosphere and almost completely de-couple the explosion from the surrounding rock, thus making it possible to do undetectable nuclear tests. According to rumour it was actually tried in extreme secrecy in Nevada and worked more or less as intended.

tty