On 'mission to touch the sun,' Parker Solar Probe launches

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Boris13c
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On 'mission to touch the sun,' Parker Solar Probe launches Saturday
(CNN)Humanity's first visit to a star begins this weekend. NASA's Parker Solar Probe will explore the sun's atmosphere in a mission that is expected to launch early Saturday. This is the agency's first mission to the sun and its outermost atmosphere, the corona.

If all goes according to plan, the probe will launch at 3:33 a.m. ET Saturday from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket, one of the world's most powerful rockets. The launch window will remain open for 65 minutes. If the probe doesn't launch on Saturday, the window for a successful launch doesn't close until August 23.

Although the probe itself is about the size of a car, a powerful rocket is needed to escape Earth's orbit, change direction and reach the sun.

The launch window was chosen because the probe will rely on Venus to help it achieve an orbit around the sun.
Six weeks after launch, the probe will encounter Venus' gravity for the first time. It will be used to help slow the probe, like pulling on a handbrake, and orient the probe so it's on a path to the sun.

"The launch energy to reach the Sun is 55 times that required to get to Mars, and two times that needed to get to Pluto," Yanping Guo of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, who designed the mission trajectory, said in a statement. "During summer, Earth and the other planets in our solar system are in the most favorable alignment to allow us to get close to the Sun."

It's not a journey that any human can make, so NASA is sending a fully autonomous probe closer to the sun than any spacecraft has ever reached.

The probe will have to withstand heat and radiation never previously experienced by any spacecraft, but the mission will also address questions that couldn't be answered before. Understanding the sun in greater detail can also shed light on Earth and its place in the solar system, researchers said.
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mmmc_35
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Interesting that you need more energy to get to the sun, even though it's gravitational pull is more. Also if large solar flares can kill circuits on earth, you would think up close smaller ones would.
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A Fireball and a Wall of Sound: What NASA's Epic Solar Probe Launch Felt Like
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — It was a pretty good morning to be looking up.

Mars hung low over my shoulder, close and bright and fiery, as I stood on a causeway across the Banana River Sunday (Aug. 12) here at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. A slight breeze kept the mosquitoes away, and Perseid meteors popped up every now and again, carving brief and slender slivers of light into the predawn sky.

And then, at 3:31 a.m. EDT (0731 GMT), that dark sky lit up in a flash of brilliant orange as a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket, one of the most powerful boosters flying today, lifted off the pad. [Launch Photos! NASA's Parker Solar Probe Blasts Off to Touch the Sun]

That flash was silent at first, like the view of a faraway nuclear blast. But about 30 seconds in, a wave of vibrations spawned by the rocket's massive engines washed over the causeway. Those vibrations drowned out the insect-like clicks of camera shutters and the frantic splashing of predator-evading Banana River fish in a monumental wall of noise.

NASA's $1.5 billion Parker Solar Probe mission was on its way into the heavens, in a whole lot of style.

"I'm in awe," Thomas Zurbuchen, the head of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, told reporters shortly after the successful liftoff. "It was a really clean launch."

There was one slight hiccup, however: The mission team lost telemetry about 40 minutes into flight, right around the time when the Parker Solar Probe was scheduled to separate from its rocket ride and start flying solo. But the connection was quickly re-established, eliciting raucous cheers from the folks in launch control (and from those of us at the press site at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, which is also here at Cape Canaveral).

If all goes according to plan, the Parker Solar Probe will fly through the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, 24 times over the next seven years. The spacecraft will get within 3.83 million miles (6.16 million kilometers) of the solar surface, zooming through space at up to 430,000 mph (690,000 km/h) during these close flybys.

Both of those figures will shatter spaceflight records: No other spacecraft has ever gotten closer to the sun than 27 million miles (43 million km) or traveled faster than 165,000 mph (265,000 km/h).
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Boris13c
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mmmc_35 wrote:Interesting that you need more energy to get to the sun, even though it's gravitational pull is more. Also if large solar flares can kill circuits on earth, you would think up close smaller ones would.


this article details the heat shielding and other techie issues to make sure the probe survives the mission :

This Solar Probe Is Built to Survive a Brush With the Sun
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Super interesting , but I think it will fail. Crystal circuits, zincromim metalaicd plutonium is fictional. Seriously though pretty crazy.
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