The Parker Solar Probe has yielded considerable insight into the formation and structure of solar winds, providing scientists that hopefully will help them better predict when mammoth ejections of solar material will occur. Coronal mass ejections can disable communications and defense satellites and can harm astronauts outside of Earth’s protective electromagnetic field.
Launched in August 2018, the probe has passed closer to the sun than at any previous spacecraft in history. The vessel is equipped with a suite of high-tech instruments engineered to withstand the sun’s blistering heat — it will pass within 15 million miles of the sun, compared to the 36 million miles of Mercury’s orbit. Instruments include five antennas, an image maker, and devices that measure the energies of different particles.
The mission’s goal is to “understand the sources and structure of the solar wind up close right as it leaves the sun,” said physicist Stuart Bale of the University of California-Berkeley, in the press conference reported by Popular Mechanics. “What Parker has done has got us closer than ever to the Sun and now we can really see a lot of structure and we can see in this case we can clearly see a source of the wind.”
Among the key findings so far:
- The solar wind is slow and highly magnetized, and it emerges from a small coronal hole at the equator — and at lower altitudes than expected.
- The solar wind is “very bursty.” The probe encountered more than 1,000 rogue magnetic waves called switchbacks, which increased the speeds of solar wind more than 300,000 miles per hour in a matter of seconds.
- As solar winds travel farther from the sun’s surface, they gain momentum. Scientists observed a growing rotation of the wind around the sum, some 15 to 20 times later than previous models predicted.
- Bursts of high-energy particles preceded coronal mass ejections by nearly a full day.
- The probe proved a century-old prediction that there is a dust-free zone surrounding the sun.
At its current location in an eliptical orbit around the sun, Parker is enmeshed in a sea of fine dust particles. A tiny speck of dust pierced one of its apertures and knocked it out of commission.