(NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez)Īmong the many unexpected solar features and forces detected by the Parker Probe is the widespread presence of switchbacks, rapid flips of the Sun’s magnetic field moving away from the Sun. They are an as-yet unexplained phenomenon that might help scientists uncover more information about how the solar wind is accelerated from the Sun. The Parker Solar Probe had observed many switchbacks in the corona- traveling disturbances in the solar wind that cause the magnetic field to bend back on itself. And we think the answers will be quite big for our field, and for science.” “We have learned so much that we believe we are getting close to finding some important answers. “Parker Solar Probe was developed to answer some of the biggest puzzles, biggest questions about our Sun,” said Nour Raouafi, project scientist for the Parker Solar Probe. The results have often surprising and, as some scientists said, “thrilling.” This is all a goldmine for solar scientists, an opportunity to study our star - and by extension all stars - up close and to learn much more about how it works.Īt a four-day conference at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab late last month, scores of scientists described the results of their early observations and analyses of the measurements and images coming from the Parker Probe via its The Wide-Field Imager (WISPR) and instruments that measure energy and magnetic flows. The probe has dipped as close as 5.3 million miles from the surface of the sun - Mercury is 32 million miles from that solar surface - and is flying through the solar wind, through streamers (rays of magnetized solar material) and even at times through coronal mass ejections, those huge eruptions of magnetized plasma flying at speeds up to nearly 2,000 miles per second. The Parker Solar Probe has been swinging further and further into the Sun’s corona, having just finished its 12th of 24 descents into a world of super-heated matter (plasma) where no human creation has ever gone. To borrow from singer Paul Simon, these are definitely days of miracles and wonders - at least when it comes to exploring and understanding our Sun.
#SUN CORONA MOVIE#
The movie is from orbit 10 and dates and distances are on the frames, and changing locations of planets are in red. The perihelion is a brief moment during the encounter time, when the spacecraft is at its closest point to the Sun.
#SUN CORONA FULL#
This movie is built from images taken over 10 days during the full perihelion encounter when the spacecraft was nearing the Sun’s corona.
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