NASA aims for sun’s corona with its new spacecraft the Solar Probe Plus
One thing we all have been curious of in our lifetime is to know how the sun’s atmosphere is heated. Scientists have had this in their wish list for years and thus, building something like the Solar Probe Plus, which can fly through the sun’s corona (its outer atmosphere), has been on solar physicists’ mind for about 50 years. Now, finally scientists and engineers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Baltimore are developing Solar Prove Plus for NASA – the spacecraft which will fly through the sun’s corona and help find answers to questions as to why the corona is so much hotter than its surface, and how it generates solar winds.
‘Flying directly into the sun's corona is a suicidal mission to be sure’ therefore, the challenge in development of the Solar Probe Plus would be to build it to withstand temperatures up to about 2,600 degree Fahrenheit, this with a shield that doesn’t ablate. Solar Probe Plus project manager Andy Dantzler said,
The whole point of the mission is to do particle detection and in situ measurements. If you're measuring part of your shield that's not going to work
The Solar Probe Plus, which will cost more than $1 billion when it is complete and launched in 2018, will go about eight times closer to the sun than any other craft ever before, that’ll be almost within the corona at distance of about 8 to 10 solar radii from the sun’s core. This mission would thus answer our questions about the sun, and would also help in improving space weather forecasts.
Via: DiscoveryNews
