The most enthusiastic will not hesitate to claim, perhaps rightly, that this is one of the most impressive technological feats in human history.
Tuesday, December 14, 2021, a few weeks after announcing his impressive speed record of 163 kilometers per second, or 586,000 kilometers per hour, NASA declared that its small Parker probe, launched in 2008, had ended up cross the critical surface of Alfvén So, to put it more prosaically, by “touching the sun”.
Hot inside!
Exploit in the exploit: this first contact with our star, so crazy and so distant, can live outside the press releases of the American agency and our imaginations, since Parker took the opportunity to take some pictures and send them to Earth.
Scientists from the JHU Applied Physics Laboratory then made an astonishing video of these images sent by the probe, taken against the backdrop of the Milky Way and a moving solar system.
I cannot stop thinking about this incredible footage, mainly:
(1) The milky way. Imaged from within a solar streamer. FFFF.
(2) Those two planets at the end? I’m almost positive it’s Venus and Mercury, but need to confirm w/ jpl horizons (or, more easily, a Parker person) https://t.co/lMu449MlBl pic.twitter.com/o7Gbiju1xX
— Grant Tremblay (@astrogrant) December 15, 2021
These thirteen short seconds during which a human-made object goes through what science calls a «Pseudostreamer», a magnetic phenomenon and structure specific to the solar corona, are to be seen below.
“Crossing this pseudostreamer was, for Parker, like passing through the eye of a cyclone, Explain a communiqué from NASA. Within it, conditions calmed down, particles slowed down, and the name of switchbacks dropped – a dramatic change from the barrage of particles the spacecraft typically encounters in solar winds. ”
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