Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns
Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns
The Sun, the heart of our solar system is a yellow dwarf star, a hot ball of glowing gases. Our Sun is a natural main-sequence G2 star, one of more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy.
The Sun Profile:
Diameter: 1,390,000 km.
Mass: 1.989e30 kg
Temperature: 5800 K (surface) 15,600,000 K (core) (1)
Do you have a question that how we get all this information? The researchers once thought to find what is there in the sun, which brightens all our days.
Space missions to the sun:
NASA, who send the space mission to the sun for the first time. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe had been the first-ever mission to “touch” the Sun. The spacecraft, nearly the size of a small car, it traveled directly into the Sun’s atmosphere about 4 million miles from the surface. Parker Solar Probe launched aboard a Delta IV-Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral on August 12, 2018, at 3:31 a.m.
The spacecraft helps scientists to answer notable questions about the Sun’s fundamental physics including how particles and solar material are stimulated out into space at such high speeds and why the Sun’s atmosphere, the corona is so much hotter than the surface below. There are nearly 28 space missions which were planned to study the sun. (2)
Aditya – L1 was the first Indian mission to study the Sun. Aditya-1 was meant to recognize only the solar corona. The outer covers of the Sun, prolonging to thousands of km above the disc (photosphere) is termed as the corona. It has a temperature of more than a million degree Kelvin which is much more powerful than the solar disc temperature of around 6000K. (3)
Presently, NASA has decided two new missions to advance our knowledge of the Sun and its dynamic effects on space. One of the chosen missions will examine how the Sun drives particles and energy into the solar system and a second will study Earth’s response.
The sun frequently emits plasma and particles into the space known as the solar wind. It produces radiation in space called space weather. When such particles communicate with earth’s magnetic field near the earth, the solar wind could drive to profound impacts on human interests, such as astronaut’s protection, GPS signals, radio communications, and efficiency grids on the ground. (4)
Understanding what makes space weather and its interaction with the Earth and lunar systems may assist scientists to moderate its effects, including safeguarding astronauts and technology essential to NASA‘s Artemis program to the Moon. The launch date for the two missions is planned in August 2022.
The researchers carefully selected these two missions not only because of the high-class science they can prepare in their own right but because they will run well together with the other heliophysics spacecraft advancing NASA’s mission to preserve astronauts, space technology and life down on Earth. These missions will do great science, but they’re also unique because they come in tiny packages, which indicates that they can launch them together and get more study for the price of a single launch. (5)
Two space missions- PUNCH and TRACERS:
The Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, or PUNCH, the mission will concentrate directly on the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, and how it creates the solar wind. Made of four suitcase-sized satellites, PUNCH will image and follow the solar wind as it leaves the Sun.
The spacecraft also will trace coronal mass ejections, large explosions of solar material that can run large space weather events near Earth, to better understand their evolution and generate new techniques for predicting such eruptions.
The second mission is Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, or TRACERS. It will see particles and fields at the Earth’s northern magnetic cusp region, the region surrounding Earth’s pole, where our planet’s magnetic field lines bend down towards Earth.
The field lines control particles from the boundary between Earth’s magnetic field and interplanetary space down into the atmosphere. In the cusp area, with its smooth access to our boundary with interplanetary space, TRACERS will investigate how magnetic fields around Earth communicate with those from the Sun.
TRACERS will be the first space mission to travel this process in the cusp with two spacecraft, providing observations of how methods change over both space and time. TRACERS unique measurements will support NASA’s mission to safeguard their technology and astronauts in space. Together, these missions will study how the star we live with drives radiation in space. (6)
Click here, to find out various upcoming mission launches.