That’s about where team members had expected to find the interface, says Nour Raouafi, the mission’s project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. The spacecraft crossed the Alfvén boundary when it was around 14 million kilometres, or just under 20 solar radii, from the Sun’s surface. A carbon-composite heat shield protects its instruments from temperatures that will eventually soar to 1,370 ☌. Since its launch in 2018, it has been orbiting the Sun: with each pass, it loops ever closer to the solar surface. Credit: Dr Juerg Alean/Science Photo Libraryīut it took the US$1.5-billion Parker Solar Probe to finally get there. The Sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, is visible during an eclipse. Swedish physicist Hannes Alfvén proposed the underlying theory behind the boundary in a paper published in Nature in 1942 2, and scientists have been looking for it ever since. This surface marks the interface between the Sun’s atmosphere and an outer region of space dominated by the solar wind.
OTHER NAMES FOR SUN CORONA DOWNLOAD
Mission scientists needed several months to download and analyse the data the spacecraft had collected, and to be sure that it had indeed crossed the much-anticipated boundary, known as the Alfvén surface. The Parker probe crossed into the Sun’s atmosphere at 09:33 universal time on 28 April. Flying into the solar corona represents “one of the last great unknowns”, he says.
“This is a huge milestone,” says Craig DeForest, a solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who is not involved in the mission. With this new front-row seat, scientists can explore some of the biggest unanswered questions about the Sun, such as how it generates the solar wind and how its corona gets heated to temperatures more extreme than those on the Sun’s surface. By contrast, the Parker probe is travelling ever closer to the heart of the Solar System, flying head-on into the solar wind and our star’s atmosphere. In 2012, Voyager 1 travelled so far from the Sun that it became the first mission to leave the region of space dominated by the solar wind - the energetic flood of particles coming from the Sun.
In many ways, the Parker Solar Probe is a counterpoint to NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft.
A paper describing the findings appears this week in Physical Review Letters 1. She and other team members spoke during a press conference at this week’s American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. Sun-bombing spacecraft uncovers secrets of the solar wind “We have finally arrived,” said Nicola Fox, director of NASA’s heliophysics division, located at the agency’s headquarters in Washington DC. The long-awaited milestone, which was reached in April but announced on 14 December, is a major accomplishment for the Parker Solar Probe, a craft that is flying closer to the Sun than any mission in history. A NASA spacecraft has entered a previously unexplored region of the Solar System - the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona.
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