Good news this week from the Sun’s far side as the Parker Solar Probe checked in after its speedrun through our star’s corona. Parker became the fastest human-made object ever — aside from the manhole cover, of course — as it fell into the Sun’s gravity well on Christmas Eve to pass within 6.1 million kilometers of the surface, in an attempt to study the extremely dynamic environment of the solar atmosphere. Similar to how manned spacecraft returning to Earth are blacked out from radio communications, the plasma soup Parker flew through meant everything it would do during the pass had to be autonomous, and we wouldn’t know how it went until the probe cleared the high-energy zone. The probe pinged Earth with a quick “I’m OK” message on December 26, and checked in with the Deep Space Network as scheduled on January 1, dumping telemetry data that indicated the spacecraft not only survived its brush with the corona but that every instrument performed as expected during the pass. The scientific data from the instruments won’t be downloaded until the probe is in a little better position, and then Parker will get to do the whole thing again twice more in 2025. Continue reading “Hackaday Links: January 5, 2025”
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Hackaday Links: December 22, 2024
Early Monday morning, while many of us will be putting the finishing touches — or just beginning, ahem — on our Christmas preparations, solar scientists will hold their collective breath as they wait for word from the Parker Solar Probe’s record-setting passage through the sun’s atmosphere. The probe, which has been in a highly elliptical solar orbit since its 2018 launch, has been getting occasional gravitational nudges by close encounters with Venus. This has moved the perihelion ever closer to the sun’s surface, and on Monday morning it will make its closest approach yet, a mere 6.1 million kilometers from the roiling photosphere. That will put it inside the corona, the sun’s extremely energetic atmosphere, which we normally only see during total eclipses. Traveling at almost 700,000 kilometers per hour, it won’t be there very long, and it’ll be doing everything it needs to do autonomously since the high-energy plasma of the corona and the eight-light-minute distance makes remote control impossible. It’ll be a few days before communications are re-established and the data downloaded, which will make a nice present for the solar science community to unwrap.