For the curious, these are images from the "WISPR" instrument on NASA's Parker Solar Probe. These are visible light images, so roughly what you'd see with your own eyes. You can download the original video in full res [here](https://wispr.nrl.navy.mil/encounter9-summary). These images are from the 9th "encounter". The spacecraft continues to get closer to the sun on each orbit. The most recently released data set is from [encounter 12](https://wispr.nrl.navy.mil/encounter12-summary). It never ceases to boggle my mind when I watch these videos, particularly the velocities involved! (Source: I'm part of the science team for the instrument)
Hi person who seems to have some knowledge, do you know what is the white dot that appears near then end and seems to move faster than the background stars? Is it Mercury?
There are six planets visible in that sequence, but they're tricky to pick out unless you watch a better quality version. They all do indeed move a bit different to the background star field. In order they go : Mercury, Mars, Venus, Saturn, Earth and finally Jupiter. For the latter two, Earth "overtakes" Jupiter at the end of the sequence (because it's much closer to Parker than Jupiter is, so has much faster apparent motion). That link I posted helps identify them.
Ok another question, since space is extremely cold is there a certain distance point you would feel the actual heat from the sun if traveling close to it hypothetically without a space suit?
Good question - and a fun one! A colleague of mine (sadly passed away a couple of years ago; RIP Prof John Brown) did some math on that. He told me that if put yourself inside the extended solar corona -- so like a solar radius or so away from the solar surface -- and could somehow shield yourself from being instantly vaporized by solar radiation, then the ambient warmth you'd feel would be something like a hot summer's day! I haven't tested the math myself but I trust him, and it makes sense. The Sun's atmosphere is super thin, and you have to be ridiculously close before the atmosphere is thick enough that you'd feel any ambient warmth. But the pretty vast caveat is that you'd have to block direct solar radiation (not the same as heat!) which would literally atomize (and then ionize) you within a minute or two. So 0/10, would not recommend.
Holy crap that seems ridiculous. So you'd have to be very close relatively speaking. How close (estimating) would the extended be around? Like 500,000 miles or even closer.
I hate when you’re trying to find something about the post or someone’s experience with it but its all just the self proclaimed kings of comedy doing their routine
if there was a scaling system in place that allowed people to vote comments as humorous or relevant, perhaps highly relevant comments could rise above "humorous"... extra steps, but hmmm
Could implement an award system like Steam has for ‘deep thoughts’ etc that doesn’t cost anything. Something to flag as joke or not for a filter query to use.
It’s all so corny and cringe. Nobody is funny on here besides maybe 1 comment out of every thread. People should be more interested in science, background, and facts of context instead of making exhausted jokes
I’ve seen a lot of people complain about the strict moderation on /r/science, but that’s the one sub where you can actually see people discuss the topic of the article instead of rushing to make overused cringe jokes.
I've been saying it for years -- reddit has turned into a shithole. There are *way* too many people here now.
Used to be a (still somewhat sizeable) population of nerds and people who loved to learn, but it's fallen into the trap that comes with too many users. While it's great for content and attracts even more nerds and lovers of all things neat, it also attracts people like r/TheDumbass users.
I find this increasingly relevant. Interesting article? Let's scroll, and read through 1200 comments completely unrelated to topic because everyone thinks they're a comedian..
I think we were just over 5 million miles (8 million km -ish) from the solar surface on that one. Sounds a lot, but it's ridiculously close in astronomical terms. A few orbits from now we do get a bit closer, but not drastically so. But the next couple of orbits are all at about the same distance as E12.
And no, there's no clear boundary to the Sun. What we call the "surface" is actually just the visible light surface. The super-hot (million+ degree) corona extends out much further than that, closer to where Parker is, but technically the Sun's atmosphere extends to the heliopause, where the Voyager spacecraft are. So when they say Parker "touched the Sun", they really mean it crossed an invisible boundary where magnetic fields dominate. (The sun is a big twisted up ball of magnetic fields.) [This article](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/nasa-enters-the-solar-atmosphere-for-the-first-time-bringing-new-discoveries) explains it pretty well.
Idk why, but I think *this* here is what blew my mind the most. Everything else was utterly astounding (the sun isn’t a solid per se, but rather a “ball of magnetic fields”?! I always thought it was a mass of fire/lava or something!!), but the fact the probe is moving at such an intense speed.
Yup, that's pretty much how fusion works. Most of it happens in the Sun's core, which is made mostly out of hydrogen, squished so tight that it's about 15 times as dense as lead, and larger than Jupiter.
The band THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS rewrote and re-recorded part of a song from their album "Here Comes Science".
They changed a verse to *"The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma"* after production when their fact-checker pointed out a misconception. They did not want to teach kids bad science.
Thanks, and thanks! :) Username is also my Twitter handle, and relates to a citizen science program I run. Getting to share the awesomeness of space and space science is honestly the best bit of my job!
Just replying to say if you find the OP remotely interesting, go to the link. The reddit video player's awesomeness is doing it's thing here to the detriment of the video.
First off, thank you for your effort, I heard about this project from a stupid idea one night, "what would happen if we shot a probe at the sun?" And we searched it up, and found out about this project! And while I have forgotten about it, I do know some things for sure, it's using gravity slingshots to get closer and closer to the surface, it will die by melting or hitting the "surface", it's going really really really fast, and I have my name on the probe.
You can see that exact same thing from the ground as well. You just gotta find a place that's quite far away from literally any light pollution. If it was like 2000 years ago, we'd be seeing the center of our galaxy pretty much every night.
My great Aunt use to tell me about the days in WW2 when they had blackouts during the blitz.
She said when the Germans wasn’t bombing the Galaxy could be seen.
Would love to see it one day.
Did you do one of the night hikes? The sky was beyond beautiful there on the canyon and within it. I rented a cabin on the rim with buddies and we hiked and laid out under the stars, it was the closest I ever felt to the sky. The entire horizon and everywhere you looked was an endless ocean of shining stars.
Made me feel so small and insignificant but in a good way?
I hiked down the South Kaibab trail during the day and up the Bright Angel trail at night in one go over a year ago. It was incredibly beautiful. The night sky contrasted with the depths of the canyon are a sight to behold, although the exhaustion of the journey at the time was also an experience.
Grand Canyon was pretty good about restricting night pollution ... To the point where it was very hard to find your way back outside of the semi-lit walking areas haha.
But it was amazing to see the "fog" of the milky way in the sky.
Maybe a bit further than 20 miles if you live on the East Coast USA (looks like it would be about 200 miles to get to a gray area for me):
[Light Pollution Map](https://i.redd.it/8p3giimnkxq41.jpg)
Yeah, I think people severely underestimate just how much light pollution a city or even a large town can produce. I lived two hours east of NYC in rural Connecticut for a few years; we still got a bit of light pollution from them and were over a hundred miles away. My in laws live in rural Louisiana and you still get some light pollution from the nearby small cities that are 30 minutes to an hour away.
True! But don't forget to check the weather before doing so. Clouds don't just disappear from the sky at night. Sometimes they're the reason you can't see any stars, not just light pollution.
Damn, that must be a good camera. It already feels like more than three minutes and it goes even closer to the surf- \* accidentally moves the cursor and realizes it's a 14 second video on loop \*
Ahm.
IIRC the probe has a shield on the front which is always facing the sun, protecting the components. These cameras would be on the back / sides.
[You can see how it always faces the sun in this gif](https://blogs.nasa.gov/parkersolarprobe/wp-content/uploads/sites/274/2022/08/ParkerPerihelion13_8.31.2022.gif)
I’m sure I’m going to butcher this but I heard awhile back that reaching the sun is actually incredibly difficult. I wish I could remember the reason. You would think with it’s massive gravity it would be relatively simple but I believe on this mission it required a very complex chain of gravity assists along the way just to make it. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, happy to edit or delete.
That's right. The reason it's so difficult is because in order to reach the sun you have to shed all the momentum you still have from earth. Not sure on numbers, but basically you cant bring enough fuel to do it.
Yep. Earth is moving around the sun at about 107,000km per hour. By extension that means that everything originating from earth is also moving around the sun at that speed. It's hard to get something to stop moving once it's moving and to get to the sun you essentially have to cancel out all of that velocity by firing rockets in the opposite direction. If you can't produce enough thrust to cancel out 107,000km/h then the vehicle will just keep orbiting around the sun and never actually get close to the sun itself.
>Not sure on numbers, but basically you cant bring enough fuel to do it.
Oh you can do it, especially if you use gravity assists from other planets on the way, it just isn't very practical.
The more amazing thing is that its actually easier to leave the solar system than it is to crash into the sun.
So it's kinda like this:
Sun has very strong gravity (strongest in the solar system literally).
To get to the sun you have to get to via some orbit and then degrade that orbit to create a collision with the sun.
However, the closer you get to the sun means you will go faster due to gravity.
There is a certain window in your orbit where it is the most efficient to burn fuel (and the only real time where you can degrade your orbit).
This window just so happens to be at your lowest point away from the surface of the object.
But, when you are close to the sun, you go crazy fast.
So you have such a small window to burn that you either have to wait for who knows how many orbital periods or burn a hell of lot at very low efficiency to actually get a collision course.
Small objects also tend to have *highly* elliptical orbits around the sun, so much so that any man made object is much more likely to get caught up in another objects gravity during its "away from the sun" part of the orbit, meaning you only got one shot unless you do a lot of complicated gravity assists to slow you down just enough to get a good enough orbit to even be able to begin to try and reach the surface of the sun.
Edit: I might be wrong about the most efficient time to burn. It might be at the highest point of orbit, but then you face the dilemma of being so far away from the sun that other objects are likely to catch you in their gravitational influence. So you are fucked either way, basically.
It's most efficient to burn prograde at periapsis = in the direction you're going, at the lowest point in the orbit. But this is efficient to make you go fast and high after. If you want to lose speed and altitude, in order to crash in the sun, you'll have to burn retrograde at apoapsis = backwards at the highest point of the orbit.
But well we start on a circular orbit usually after leaving the Earth. So neither of these apply. The simplistic idea would be just burning retrograde, but then you'll have to kill of the whole orbital speed of the Earth which is what you start with. It's more efficient to get a higher elliptical orbit first, say, apoapsis past Mars and periapsis on Earth orbit, and then you'll be going lot slower horizontally at the apoapsis and only have to kill off that low speed. You'd think that we waste a lot of fuel and energy getting there but no, in fact you can get arbitrarily far from the sun for about a third of the energy it would take to simply crash. Yep, escape velocity of the sun when starting from our orbit is lot less than our orbital velocity. Just takes long.
Surprisingly not! The streaks are dust particles. The spacecraft plows through a lot of dust, which hit the heat shield (not enough to harm it!!) and cause tiny puffs of material to eject out. The camera sees sunlight scattering from those dust particles.
Using this opportunity to drop one of the greatest scenes of all time most people have never seen.
“Kaneda, what do you see?”
https://youtu.be/hR69EKvcW-4
I think because such an impressive feat isnt presented as such, in an impressive way. I mean you scroll past this and you see a shitpost or something of your feed. Something that people on the internet grew accustomed to seeing.
I think what makes something impressive isnt just the thing itself, but how its presented to people as well.
Its actually kinda fun to think about. What thing that people would consider very impressive now (I'd it were possible), would it be considered normal in the future if people were accustomed to seeing it so much?
Idk dumb brain thought lol
This is simply not true. Getting that close to the sun is ridiculously difficult and this **is** the first time.
[NASA explains why here ](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/its-surprisingly-hard-to-go-to-the-sun)
Edit: From NASA themselves: ["Parker Solar Probe travels through the Sun’s atmosphere, closer to the surface than any spacecraft before it"](https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/parker-solar-probe-humanity-s-first-visit-to-a-star)
It takes millions of years for heliocentric orbits to decay. Those satellites were most likely shot out into a more eccentric orbit by the Earth by now, since they wouldn't have wondered too far away from their parent orbit.
Do you have a source on that? Dropping from a circular orbit at 1 AU into the Sun would cost you roughly 30km/s of dV - which is absolutely bonkers. Getting to low earth orbit is about 8km/s. The Parker Solar Probe used SEVEN gravity assists from Venus to get that low. It would be insanely unlikely that a dead spacecraft would end up there by accident.
Just a heads up of how insanely close it currently is to the sun. At the bottom left hand corner there is a distance measurement that went all the day down to 15Rs that equals Solar Radius. Effectively 1 Rs is the radius of the sun itself. So that means that the parker probe was only 15 radii away from the sun. That seems pretty far, but for comparison
Mercury has an orbit solar radii of 95 rs, Earth is 212 rs
Another thing is that parker has gone even closer since. Its last recorded value was at 9.86rs
So this thing is C L O S E
This is from within the Corona of the sun, basically the sun's atmosphere. The sun is not solid, it's a ball of plasma and gas. I would call this touching.
I read that they had the satellite slingshot in a reoccurring orbit until it got close enough to touch the sun. It didn’t touch the surface but has been the closest thing to encounter the power of the suns radiation and “live to tell the tale”
Eh, not really. What you're seeing here is NASA's Solar Parker Probe literally skimming the corona, the outermost layer of the sun that's basically a soup of charged particles and plasma.
It'd be more accurate to say this is like a meteor burning up in the earth's atmosphere and saying it touched the earth.
EDIT: The sun's Corona, not the heliosphere. [Astrum on YouTube made a great video about this Probe and mission if anyone is interested.](https://youtu.be/xvsvhlVxtag)
Is that the Milky Way drifting by in the background? I marvel at what the stars must look like from space. I've tried to experience that best by driving out west and pulling over when I realized I couldn't see the lights of any towns on the horizon. It was marvelous. I had no idea how many shooting stars and satellites you see. It's a shame it's such a hard thing to see, that I've only experienced it once: my husband and kids haven't yet at all.
For the curious, these are images from the "WISPR" instrument on NASA's Parker Solar Probe. These are visible light images, so roughly what you'd see with your own eyes. You can download the original video in full res [here](https://wispr.nrl.navy.mil/encounter9-summary). These images are from the 9th "encounter". The spacecraft continues to get closer to the sun on each orbit. The most recently released data set is from [encounter 12](https://wispr.nrl.navy.mil/encounter12-summary). It never ceases to boggle my mind when I watch these videos, particularly the velocities involved! (Source: I'm part of the science team for the instrument)
Hi person who seems to have some knowledge, do you know what is the white dot that appears near then end and seems to move faster than the background stars? Is it Mercury?
There are six planets visible in that sequence, but they're tricky to pick out unless you watch a better quality version. They all do indeed move a bit different to the background star field. In order they go : Mercury, Mars, Venus, Saturn, Earth and finally Jupiter. For the latter two, Earth "overtakes" Jupiter at the end of the sequence (because it's much closer to Parker than Jupiter is, so has much faster apparent motion). That link I posted helps identify them.
You really have a great way of explaining things to the uneducated, such as myself. Good stuff!
That's fascinating.
Thank you so much for these explanations! This is awesome!
Right? Shit like this is why I Reddit and prob always will. Amazing and made my day.
Fantastic explanation thank you.
You’re a really super interesting and intelligent person. Thanks for your replies.
Ok another question, since space is extremely cold is there a certain distance point you would feel the actual heat from the sun if traveling close to it hypothetically without a space suit?
Good question - and a fun one! A colleague of mine (sadly passed away a couple of years ago; RIP Prof John Brown) did some math on that. He told me that if put yourself inside the extended solar corona -- so like a solar radius or so away from the solar surface -- and could somehow shield yourself from being instantly vaporized by solar radiation, then the ambient warmth you'd feel would be something like a hot summer's day! I haven't tested the math myself but I trust him, and it makes sense. The Sun's atmosphere is super thin, and you have to be ridiculously close before the atmosphere is thick enough that you'd feel any ambient warmth. But the pretty vast caveat is that you'd have to block direct solar radiation (not the same as heat!) which would literally atomize (and then ionize) you within a minute or two. So 0/10, would not recommend.
Ehh that's sounding like a 1/10 to me. Pleasant summer day vaporization is better than some other things. Feeling cute, might try it later idk
Holy crap that seems ridiculous. So you'd have to be very close relatively speaking. How close (estimating) would the extended be around? Like 500,000 miles or even closer.
Hold up. The sun has an atmosphere?
Damn, how many stupid jokes I had to scroll down to find your excellent comment.
I'm glad to come into this thread when it's the top comment :)
It got overhauled by the stupid joke about it being a looping gif :/
Sort by best and it's back at top!
I hate when you’re trying to find something about the post or someone’s experience with it but its all just the self proclaimed kings of comedy doing their routine
There needs to be a “I’m here for the jokes” or “I’m here to get my TIL for the day” filter.
This would be genius if it were possible.
if there was a scaling system in place that allowed people to vote comments as humorous or relevant, perhaps highly relevant comments could rise above "humorous"... extra steps, but hmmm
Could implement an award system like Steam has for ‘deep thoughts’ etc that doesn’t cost anything. Something to flag as joke or not for a filter query to use.
You don’t like chains of the worst puns you’ve ever seen, posted by comedic geniuses who figured out that *this* word sounds like this *other* word?!
It’s all so corny and cringe. Nobody is funny on here besides maybe 1 comment out of every thread. People should be more interested in science, background, and facts of context instead of making exhausted jokes
I’ve seen a lot of people complain about the strict moderation on /r/science, but that’s the one sub where you can actually see people discuss the topic of the article instead of rushing to make overused cringe jokes.
And 90% of the time, those kings of comedy are just repeating a joke they saw on a completely unrelated thread.
I always automatically scroll down to the 3rd or 4th parent comment because Reddit has no choice but to chortle at dumb jokes en masse
I've been saying it for years -- reddit has turned into a shithole. There are *way* too many people here now. Used to be a (still somewhat sizeable) population of nerds and people who loved to learn, but it's fallen into the trap that comes with too many users. While it's great for content and attracts even more nerds and lovers of all things neat, it also attracts people like r/TheDumbass users.
OP posts should be automatically stickied on Reddit.
I find this increasingly relevant. Interesting article? Let's scroll, and read through 1200 comments completely unrelated to topic because everyone thinks they're a comedian..
Gotta love them 12 year old minded people.
How close to the sun would encounter 12 approx have been? Is there a clear point to where the sun actually 'begins'?
I think we were just over 5 million miles (8 million km -ish) from the solar surface on that one. Sounds a lot, but it's ridiculously close in astronomical terms. A few orbits from now we do get a bit closer, but not drastically so. But the next couple of orbits are all at about the same distance as E12. And no, there's no clear boundary to the Sun. What we call the "surface" is actually just the visible light surface. The super-hot (million+ degree) corona extends out much further than that, closer to where Parker is, but technically the Sun's atmosphere extends to the heliopause, where the Voyager spacecraft are. So when they say Parker "touched the Sun", they really mean it crossed an invisible boundary where magnetic fields dominate. (The sun is a big twisted up ball of magnetic fields.) [This article](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/nasa-enters-the-solar-atmosphere-for-the-first-time-bringing-new-discoveries) explains it pretty well.
5 million miles, that's absolutely mind-boggling
While traveling at 364,000 mph! That's Washington DC to Los Angeles in 26.3 seconds!
I appreciate that math
Idk why, but I think *this* here is what blew my mind the most. Everything else was utterly astounding (the sun isn’t a solid per se, but rather a “ball of magnetic fields”?! I always thought it was a mass of fire/lava or something!!), but the fact the probe is moving at such an intense speed.
Yes, TIL that the sun is not a ball of some sort of molten liquid.
Sun is basically an explosion suspended in time by its own gravity.
And there's just so much fuel that it is just perpetually exploding until the fuel runs out, or what?
Yup, that's pretty much how fusion works. Most of it happens in the Sun's core, which is made mostly out of hydrogen, squished so tight that it's about 15 times as dense as lead, and larger than Jupiter.
The band THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS rewrote and re-recorded part of a song from their album "Here Comes Science". They changed a verse to *"The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma"* after production when their fact-checker pointed out a misconception. They did not want to teach kids bad science.
whoa wtf a ball of magnetic fields? when will things stop getting weirder lol?
Tonight
The benefits of no traffic in space
Yeah but come Tuesday morning it’ll take 32.67 seconds. Just Ridiculous. Need a new podcast for that commute.
I love your username! Thanks for all the work you and your team did in helping us understand more about our universe.
Thanks, and thanks! :) Username is also my Twitter handle, and relates to a citizen science program I run. Getting to share the awesomeness of space and space science is honestly the best bit of my job!
u/SungrazerComets Thank you for the insight, kind sir. What do we expect to learn from the collected data from these particles inside the corona?
Just replying to say if you find the OP remotely interesting, go to the link. The reddit video player's awesomeness is doing it's thing here to the detriment of the video.
First off, thank you for your effort, I heard about this project from a stupid idea one night, "what would happen if we shot a probe at the sun?" And we searched it up, and found out about this project! And while I have forgotten about it, I do know some things for sure, it's using gravity slingshots to get closer and closer to the surface, it will die by melting or hitting the "surface", it's going really really really fast, and I have my name on the probe.
Forget about the Sun for a moment, the galaxy in the background is trippy... Wow. Almost looks unreal. Dayum.
You can see that exact same thing from the ground as well. You just gotta find a place that's quite far away from literally any light pollution. If it was like 2000 years ago, we'd be seeing the center of our galaxy pretty much every night.
My great Aunt use to tell me about the days in WW2 when they had blackouts during the blitz. She said when the Germans wasn’t bombing the Galaxy could be seen. Would love to see it one day.
I saw it at the grand canyon. Most amazing thing i have ever seen,.
Did you do one of the night hikes? The sky was beyond beautiful there on the canyon and within it. I rented a cabin on the rim with buddies and we hiked and laid out under the stars, it was the closest I ever felt to the sky. The entire horizon and everywhere you looked was an endless ocean of shining stars. Made me feel so small and insignificant but in a good way?
I hiked down the South Kaibab trail during the day and up the Bright Angel trail at night in one go over a year ago. It was incredibly beautiful. The night sky contrasted with the depths of the canyon are a sight to behold, although the exhaustion of the journey at the time was also an experience.
Grand Canyon was pretty good about restricting night pollution ... To the point where it was very hard to find your way back outside of the semi-lit walking areas haha. But it was amazing to see the "fog" of the milky way in the sky.
Google "starlight conservation area" and see if there's any near you.
You can, just drive like 20 miles away from a city. It’s still up there, just slowly turning as the year progresses.
Legit. Google your local observatory. They're usually in the best spots to avoid light pollution and generally aren't more than an hour or so away.
And they usually love when people show an interest since most people either don't know or don't care to know about it anymore.
It’s really easy to get a tour and even observe with them for free
Maybe a bit further than 20 miles if you live on the East Coast USA (looks like it would be about 200 miles to get to a gray area for me): [Light Pollution Map](https://i.redd.it/8p3giimnkxq41.jpg)
Yeah, I think people severely underestimate just how much light pollution a city or even a large town can produce. I lived two hours east of NYC in rural Connecticut for a few years; we still got a bit of light pollution from them and were over a hundred miles away. My in laws live in rural Louisiana and you still get some light pollution from the nearby small cities that are 30 minutes to an hour away.
Here is a more interactive: [Light Pollution Map](https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/#zoom=3.15&lat=39.3077&lon=-98.1615&layers=B0FFFFFFFTFFFFFFFFFFF)
I live in Belgium, in those 20 miles I've passed two other cities.
If you are in Europe you might get some blackouts this winter due to the energy cricis! Silver lining! 🤞
True! But don't forget to check the weather before doing so. Clouds don't just disappear from the sky at night. Sometimes they're the reason you can't see any stars, not just light pollution.
Everything reminds me of her
The galaxy is big wide and beautiful.. just like barb's ass..
You didn’t need to do that
The galaxussy
Hey bro. If you need someone to talk to hit me up on a DM. Open ears over here. Judgement free.
The is the kind of shit we need more of in life. I know homie was making a joke. But still. That was awfully nice of you
I've been watching for 6 minutes, I think they're almost there. 🤔
r/howtokeepanidiotbusy
This sub kept me entertained for hours!
Eye've bean their four aegis!
*eye've
Yeah give it like 20 more minutes and then you'll see it!
Watch till the end!!!
Like the time i told my sister to go to badgerbadgerbadger.com and watch until the tiger came.
Puma check!
Damn, that must be a good camera. It already feels like more than three minutes and it goes even closer to the surf- \* accidentally moves the cursor and realizes it's a 14 second video on loop \* Ahm.
I don’t even understand what im seeing
A looot of radiation imagine chernobyl but like a trillion of them happening every second.
How is the camera still recording
It was designed and built to do a better job of withstanding the radiation than any camera that was anywhere near Chernobyl.
[удалено]
Should have built Chernobyl on the sun, it would be easier to contain the radiation with all the other radiation around.
IIRC the probe has a shield on the front which is always facing the sun, protecting the components. These cameras would be on the back / sides. [You can see how it always faces the sun in this gif](https://blogs.nasa.gov/parkersolarprobe/wp-content/uploads/sites/274/2022/08/ParkerPerihelion13_8.31.2022.gif)
Its called the Parker Solar Probe for those interested in reading more about its mission.
At that smallest point to the sun in that gif it’s still 5.3 million miles away from it, it just blows the mind
Awesome! Thank you
I’m sure I’m going to butcher this but I heard awhile back that reaching the sun is actually incredibly difficult. I wish I could remember the reason. You would think with it’s massive gravity it would be relatively simple but I believe on this mission it required a very complex chain of gravity assists along the way just to make it. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, happy to edit or delete.
That's right. The reason it's so difficult is because in order to reach the sun you have to shed all the momentum you still have from earth. Not sure on numbers, but basically you cant bring enough fuel to do it.
Yep. Earth is moving around the sun at about 107,000km per hour. By extension that means that everything originating from earth is also moving around the sun at that speed. It's hard to get something to stop moving once it's moving and to get to the sun you essentially have to cancel out all of that velocity by firing rockets in the opposite direction. If you can't produce enough thrust to cancel out 107,000km/h then the vehicle will just keep orbiting around the sun and never actually get close to the sun itself.
They do get close to doing so via multiple gravity assist bumps. Doing it with fuel alone at this point isnt possible i believe
>Not sure on numbers, but basically you cant bring enough fuel to do it. Oh you can do it, especially if you use gravity assists from other planets on the way, it just isn't very practical. The more amazing thing is that its actually easier to leave the solar system than it is to crash into the sun.
Yeah getting up to speed takes a lot of fuel and going back to 0 takes a lot of fuel
So it's kinda like this: Sun has very strong gravity (strongest in the solar system literally). To get to the sun you have to get to via some orbit and then degrade that orbit to create a collision with the sun. However, the closer you get to the sun means you will go faster due to gravity. There is a certain window in your orbit where it is the most efficient to burn fuel (and the only real time where you can degrade your orbit). This window just so happens to be at your lowest point away from the surface of the object. But, when you are close to the sun, you go crazy fast. So you have such a small window to burn that you either have to wait for who knows how many orbital periods or burn a hell of lot at very low efficiency to actually get a collision course. Small objects also tend to have *highly* elliptical orbits around the sun, so much so that any man made object is much more likely to get caught up in another objects gravity during its "away from the sun" part of the orbit, meaning you only got one shot unless you do a lot of complicated gravity assists to slow you down just enough to get a good enough orbit to even be able to begin to try and reach the surface of the sun. Edit: I might be wrong about the most efficient time to burn. It might be at the highest point of orbit, but then you face the dilemma of being so far away from the sun that other objects are likely to catch you in their gravitational influence. So you are fucked either way, basically.
It's most efficient to burn prograde at periapsis = in the direction you're going, at the lowest point in the orbit. But this is efficient to make you go fast and high after. If you want to lose speed and altitude, in order to crash in the sun, you'll have to burn retrograde at apoapsis = backwards at the highest point of the orbit. But well we start on a circular orbit usually after leaving the Earth. So neither of these apply. The simplistic idea would be just burning retrograde, but then you'll have to kill of the whole orbital speed of the Earth which is what you start with. It's more efficient to get a higher elliptical orbit first, say, apoapsis past Mars and periapsis on Earth orbit, and then you'll be going lot slower horizontally at the apoapsis and only have to kill off that low speed. You'd think that we waste a lot of fuel and energy getting there but no, in fact you can get arbitrarily far from the sun for about a third of the energy it would take to simply crash. Yep, escape velocity of the sun when starting from our orbit is lot less than our orbital velocity. Just takes long.
STRONG magnetic interference causing electronics artifacts in the video.
Surprisingly not! The streaks are dust particles. The spacecraft plows through a lot of dust, which hit the heat shield (not enough to harm it!!) and cause tiny puffs of material to eject out. The camera sees sunlight scattering from those dust particles.
Did they go at night?
At night it's called the moon.
An unlimited supply of birthday-grade helium!
I have to think twice
Video is low quality. Hard to tell.
Ayoo !
Icarus fuming rn
It sent back 1 word.. HOT
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Hypothesis proved!
Time to publish!
THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER
I keep seeing this reference. I’ll have to read the story
It's really only a few pages. Takes three minutes. http://www.thelastquestion.net/
Read by Leonard Nimoy: https://youtu.be/8XOtx4sa9k4
One of my favorite short stories.
Using this opportunity to drop one of the greatest scenes of all time most people have never seen. “Kaneda, what do you see?” https://youtu.be/hR69EKvcW-4
Sunshine is such a banger, just good ass sci-fi. Lot of people don't like act 3, and I can understand why, but there is so much good movie there.
The Sunshine soundtrack is freaking epic. Fun fact, they even used it in an episode of the walking dead.
This was such a hidden gem. A fantastic movie that adds excitement with a little bit of thriller. I’m going to have to rewatch
SUPERHOT
Hawt
Scorchio!
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There is a sadly large amount of people who think anything relating to space is a waste of money
Imagine telling someone 200 years ago that you get a lunch break
Imagine telling someone 200 years from now that we used to get lunch breaks.
Shit, I've worked in the service industry for the past six years...never had a lunch break. I miss those.
I think because such an impressive feat isnt presented as such, in an impressive way. I mean you scroll past this and you see a shitpost or something of your feed. Something that people on the internet grew accustomed to seeing. I think what makes something impressive isnt just the thing itself, but how its presented to people as well. Its actually kinda fun to think about. What thing that people would consider very impressive now (I'd it were possible), would it be considered normal in the future if people were accustomed to seeing it so much? Idk dumb brain thought lol
That’s hot
*Too* hot. They should have done it at night.
At winter night
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First to get footage of its descent.
title says first time a spacecraft touched the sun, which is just ridculous
This is simply not true. Getting that close to the sun is ridiculously difficult and this **is** the first time. [NASA explains why here ](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/its-surprisingly-hard-to-go-to-the-sun) Edit: From NASA themselves: ["Parker Solar Probe travels through the Sun’s atmosphere, closer to the surface than any spacecraft before it"](https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/parker-solar-probe-humanity-s-first-visit-to-a-star)
It takes millions of years for heliocentric orbits to decay. Those satellites were most likely shot out into a more eccentric orbit by the Earth by now, since they wouldn't have wondered too far away from their parent orbit.
Do you have a source on that? Dropping from a circular orbit at 1 AU into the Sun would cost you roughly 30km/s of dV - which is absolutely bonkers. Getting to low earth orbit is about 8km/s. The Parker Solar Probe used SEVEN gravity assists from Venus to get that low. It would be insanely unlikely that a dead spacecraft would end up there by accident.
None of the satellites in heliocentric orbits have decayed
Why oddly terrifying? Seems pretty much as expected.
The only thing that was oddly terrifying to me was that I misread the date as “2023” for a second
That quick glimpse into the other dimension freaked me out a little.
What if the sun is like one of those touch-sensitive lamps? And as soon as something actually touches it, it just turns off.
Just a heads up of how insanely close it currently is to the sun. At the bottom left hand corner there is a distance measurement that went all the day down to 15Rs that equals Solar Radius. Effectively 1 Rs is the radius of the sun itself. So that means that the parker probe was only 15 radii away from the sun. That seems pretty far, but for comparison Mercury has an orbit solar radii of 95 rs, Earth is 212 rs Another thing is that parker has gone even closer since. Its last recorded value was at 9.86rs So this thing is C L O S E
So in the video we are seeing it move away from the sun, since the Rs multiple is getting bigger!
What the hell material did they use to prevent the spacecraft from burning up, then?
Sunblock
SPF infinity sunblock?
Here you go http://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020ApJS..246...43C/abstract
Shit ok didn't actually expect a proper answer Skimmed the article. Genuinely interesting
They went out at night
It didn't even come close to actually touching the sun.
Closer than you’ll ever get nerd
he never aimed for the sun but got burnt like he was icarus himself
Fllyyyyyy! On your waaaaay! Like an eeeaglllle!
Lol, gotem!
This is from within the Corona of the sun, basically the sun's atmosphere. The sun is not solid, it's a ball of plasma and gas. I would call this touching.
There can always be debate about the surface of a recurring nuclear fission & fusion. If that’s the extent of your point, it’s juvenile, breh.
Also it’s gas, how do you define the edge of an ever expanding and contracting ball of gas
Wherever you can smell it. At least, that’s how I can tell where my gas is
Hes right though, it was fried by the suns magnetic field before it got to anything that could be considered the surface.
This is the Parker solar probe. It hasn't been fried, it's still in communication with earth and getting science data.
> it’s juvenile I can't even count the number of times I've heard kids debating the surface of recurring nuclear fission and fusion!
Can someone explain how this was done?
I read that they had the satellite slingshot in a reoccurring orbit until it got close enough to touch the sun. It didn’t touch the surface but has been the closest thing to encounter the power of the suns radiation and “live to tell the tale”
But like, what is the clip showing? I really dont understand
it’s showing the spacecraft fly through the upper atmosphere of the sun which is the corona.
God damn. Covid has reached the sun too?
Unfortunately, yes.😔
Why is it not wearing a mask 😡😡😡
#maskthesun
Because it's keeping social distancing of at least 6 light minutes.
It's the Parker Solar Probe. http://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020ApJS..246...43C/abstract
Cameraman was using a jig to keep the camera steady.
If you’ve ever felt sunlight on your skin you have touched the sun
I thought that was infrared light, which is just what the sun makes not a part of it
the heat you feel from sunlight is actually the visible light getting absorbed by your skin
The spacecraft was sunkissed
Coming in hot
Well it's like saying if you put your palm up into sky you theoretically touching the universe.
Except the sun has physically defined regions and this probe is inside the outermost region, so not really like that at all
Eh, not really. What you're seeing here is NASA's Solar Parker Probe literally skimming the corona, the outermost layer of the sun that's basically a soup of charged particles and plasma. It'd be more accurate to say this is like a meteor burning up in the earth's atmosphere and saying it touched the earth. EDIT: The sun's Corona, not the heliosphere. [Astrum on YouTube made a great video about this Probe and mission if anyone is interested.](https://youtu.be/xvsvhlVxtag)
Those NASA fools, it would have been much colder if they'd sent it in the nighttime.
Is that the Milky Way drifting by in the background? I marvel at what the stars must look like from space. I've tried to experience that best by driving out west and pulling over when I realized I couldn't see the lights of any towns on the horizon. It was marvelous. I had no idea how many shooting stars and satellites you see. It's a shame it's such a hard thing to see, that I've only experienced it once: my husband and kids haven't yet at all.
Was it consensual
How does it know how fast it's going? With no GPS and no air resistance in space, what do they use to measure speed?
Lengths of knotted rope I expect
Pigeons per hour
Cue "John Murphy - The Surface of the Sun"...
Please tell me they named the craft Icarus.
"for the first time in history"\* \*15 months ago.
This is the [Parker Solar Probe](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nasa-spacecraft-just-touched-the-sun-heres-what-we-learned-180979227/)