News Nasa is planning trip to the sun?!?!
- Thread starter jinglesassy
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that have been launched to study the Sun, but I'm not sure if any of them burned :
jinglesassy
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Yes but weren't all of those orbiters viewing from atleast mercury distance?
Orbinaut Pete
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Spaceflight Now: "Solar Probe Plus instruments will brave the sun's wrath".
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The Huntsville Times: "Huntsville scientists have key role in 'Hubble class' mission to study Sun".
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NASA TV Video: Closest-Ever Probe of Sun is New NASA Mission.
---------- Post added at 06:52 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:27 PM ----------
The Huntsville Times: "Huntsville scientists have key role in 'Hubble class' mission to study Sun".
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Orbinaut Pete
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Orbinaut Pete
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NASA Awards CU-Boulder $6.7 Million to Design Instruments for Mission to Sun.
A team from the University of Colorado at Boulder has been awarded $6.7 million from NASA to design, develop and test instruments for the fastest space probe ever built, one that will orbit 22 times closer to the sun than Earth and well inside the orbit of Mercury to better understand how the sun ticks.
The mission, a small-car-sized satellite known as Solar Probe Plus, is slated for launch in 2018. The probe will take five years to reach its closest orbit of the sun -- zipping to within four million miles of it -- in a region that has never been visited by a spacecraft. The satellite will be equipped with a high-tech heat shield to protect it from the searing 2,550 degree Fahrenheit temperatures.
The mission should help scientists to better forecast the radiation environment in which future space explorers will work and live, according to NASA officials. At its closest point to the sun, the spacecraft will be traveling at a mind-bending 400,000 miles per hour -- more than 100 miles per second.
CU-Boulder's role in the mission is for a portion of the Fields Experiment that is led by the University of California, Berkeley, and which will measure electric and magnetic fields, radio emissions and shock waves traveling through the sun's atmospheric plasma. Headed by Robert Ergun of CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, the CU team will design and test key components of the electrical and magnetic field instruments, including the spacecraft's antennas and the onboard signal and data processing hardware.
"This has been more than 20 years in the making," said Ergun, a professor in CU-Boulder's astrophysical and planetary sciences department. "It's time for us to sharpen our pencils and refine our designs for what has finally become a real mission." LASP Research Associate David Malaspina is a co-investigator on the CU effort.
Ergun said LASP is designing the "heart" of the Fields Experiment that will play a major role in the mission. "This is what we call forefront science -- nobody has ever been this close to the sun before, and we hope it will eventually help us to understand how the universe works, since the sun is one of many trillions of stars in the universe and the only one that we can get to from Earth. As NASA puts it, this is our first visit to a star."
The major question the Solar Probe Plus team hopes to answer is what drives the solar wind, a stream of charged particles whipping off the sun at millions of miles per hour that eventually affects the solar system and Earth, said Ergun. Another important question the scientists hope to answer is why the sun's corona -- a region of plasma surrounding the sun that is visible during solar eclipses -- is hotter than its surface.
NASA is funding five proposals selected for Solar Probe Plus, including the Fields Experiment, for $180 million. The cost includes preliminary analysis, design development and tests. The four antennas that will be riding on the spacecraft as part of the Fields Experiment are each expected to be about 8 feet long and will be placed on each corner of the square heat shield and will be exposed to the sun, said Ergun.
Both the heat shield and the antennas will be made with a material known as "carbon-carbon," which consists of a carbon fiber knitted together with a carbon matrix. "This will be one of the most challenging missions NASA has ever attempted," Ergun said. "If the heat shield is even a few degrees off its angle toward the sun, the spacecraft will literally be toast."
After launch, the spacecraft will make several flybys of Earth and Venus before setting out for orbit around the sun. The flybys will help to slow the spacecraft down and allow it to be inserted into the correct, elliptical orbit around the sun, said Ergun.
In addition to CU-Boulder and the University of California, Berkeley, other participating institutions in the mission include the University of Minnesota, Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the Paris Observatory.
For more information on the Solar Probe Plus mission visit http://solarprobe.gsfc.nasa.gov. For more information on LASP visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home.
A team from the University of Colorado at Boulder has been awarded $6.7 million from NASA to design, develop and test instruments for the fastest space probe ever built, one that will orbit 22 times closer to the sun than Earth and well inside the orbit of Mercury to better understand how the sun ticks.
The mission, a small-car-sized satellite known as Solar Probe Plus, is slated for launch in 2018. The probe will take five years to reach its closest orbit of the sun -- zipping to within four million miles of it -- in a region that has never been visited by a spacecraft. The satellite will be equipped with a high-tech heat shield to protect it from the searing 2,550 degree Fahrenheit temperatures.
The mission should help scientists to better forecast the radiation environment in which future space explorers will work and live, according to NASA officials. At its closest point to the sun, the spacecraft will be traveling at a mind-bending 400,000 miles per hour -- more than 100 miles per second.
CU-Boulder's role in the mission is for a portion of the Fields Experiment that is led by the University of California, Berkeley, and which will measure electric and magnetic fields, radio emissions and shock waves traveling through the sun's atmospheric plasma. Headed by Robert Ergun of CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, the CU team will design and test key components of the electrical and magnetic field instruments, including the spacecraft's antennas and the onboard signal and data processing hardware.
"This has been more than 20 years in the making," said Ergun, a professor in CU-Boulder's astrophysical and planetary sciences department. "It's time for us to sharpen our pencils and refine our designs for what has finally become a real mission." LASP Research Associate David Malaspina is a co-investigator on the CU effort.
Ergun said LASP is designing the "heart" of the Fields Experiment that will play a major role in the mission. "This is what we call forefront science -- nobody has ever been this close to the sun before, and we hope it will eventually help us to understand how the universe works, since the sun is one of many trillions of stars in the universe and the only one that we can get to from Earth. As NASA puts it, this is our first visit to a star."
The major question the Solar Probe Plus team hopes to answer is what drives the solar wind, a stream of charged particles whipping off the sun at millions of miles per hour that eventually affects the solar system and Earth, said Ergun. Another important question the scientists hope to answer is why the sun's corona -- a region of plasma surrounding the sun that is visible during solar eclipses -- is hotter than its surface.
NASA is funding five proposals selected for Solar Probe Plus, including the Fields Experiment, for $180 million. The cost includes preliminary analysis, design development and tests. The four antennas that will be riding on the spacecraft as part of the Fields Experiment are each expected to be about 8 feet long and will be placed on each corner of the square heat shield and will be exposed to the sun, said Ergun.
Both the heat shield and the antennas will be made with a material known as "carbon-carbon," which consists of a carbon fiber knitted together with a carbon matrix. "This will be one of the most challenging missions NASA has ever attempted," Ergun said. "If the heat shield is even a few degrees off its angle toward the sun, the spacecraft will literally be toast."
After launch, the spacecraft will make several flybys of Earth and Venus before setting out for orbit around the sun. The flybys will help to slow the spacecraft down and allow it to be inserted into the correct, elliptical orbit around the sun, said Ergun.
In addition to CU-Boulder and the University of California, Berkeley, other participating institutions in the mission include the University of Minnesota, Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the Paris Observatory.
For more information on the Solar Probe Plus mission visit http://solarprobe.gsfc.nasa.gov. For more information on LASP visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home.
Salun
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Urwumpe
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The image processing software inside the wide-field camera of Solar Probe Plus will be supplied by the University of Göttingen (named the Lower Saxon university by the time SSP will launch).
http://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/3240.html?cid=3649
http://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/3240.html?cid=3649
Pyromaniac605
Toast! :D
So that's what I heard coming from the general direction of Switzerland. :lol:
Why do they even need to study the Sun? We have all the answers.
Simple Explanation: Its a giant fireball with lots of gravity.
Complicated explanation: Magnitude: 4.83
Diameter: 109 x Earth
Equatorial Radius: 109 x Earth
Equatorial Circumference: 109 x Earth
Core Density: 150 g/cm
Made mostly of He and H.
Temperature: 5,505 °C (approx)
What else do we really need to know? Why do we care?
Darren
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Only because you can work with so little knowledge about the sun, this doesn't apply to others.
Just try for example to explain how solar tsunamis are caused. Or if there are really just 2 cycles in the activity of the sun, or maybe more.
We haven't even really started to use the tool of helioseismology for getting more information about the sun.
Being able to predict a coronal mass ejection would be a major achievement, currently we can just detect them.
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http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/sunearthsystem/main/solarprobeplus.html
"The experiments selected for Solar Probe Plus are specifically designed to solve two key questions of solar physics -- why is the sun's outer atmosphere so much hotter than the sun's visible surface and what propels the solar wind that affects Earth and our solar system? " said Dick Fisher, director of NASA's Heliophysics Division in Washington. "We've been struggling with these questions for decades and this mission should finally provide those answers."
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Business Wire: NRL’s Wide-field Imager Selected for Solar Probe Plus Mission.
Urwumpe
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Since it wasn't posted yet here, the less official SP+ page:
http://solarprobe.jhuapl.edu/
Contains the 38 MB engineering report with all the design data and trajectory options that would be nice for an add-on.
http://solarprobe.jhuapl.edu/
Contains the 38 MB engineering report with all the design data and trajectory options that would be nice for an add-on.
dumbo2007
Crazy about real time sims
regarding the heat dissipation challenge - excuse me if it sounds stupid, but if electromagnetic shields shields are designed to completely envelop the space craft and keep the radiation away and magnetic shields do the same with plasma to keep it away from the hull, then nothing is conveying heat to the spacecraft anymore - so a powerful power source like nuclear energy can support the shields and keep the craft alive longer.
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