NASA shows video of solar wind created by Parker Solar Probe
The Parker Solar Probe was launched a year ago with the aim of studying the solar wind, among other things. NASA has published images of the solar wind made by the probe during its first “encounter” with the sun.
A short NASA video shows images of the solar wind taken with both telescopes of the Wispr instrument. These images were taken between 6 and 10 November last year, combining the fields of view of the two telescopes. The solar wind flows from left to right past the telescopes. The bright structure near the center of the left image is a streamer. That’s a relatively dense, slow flow of the solar wind coming from the sun’s equator. Furthermore, the center of the Milky Way can be seen in the right frame and the white dot in the left image is Mercury. The thin white stripes are dust particles that shoot past Wispr’s cameras.
The video seems to speed up and then slow down again, but according to NASA, this is because of the way the data is stored. This happened at various points during the Sun’s orbit and during perihelion. That is the closest point to the sun of an object orbiting the sun. There, the spacecraft stores more images than usual. This increased number of frames per section gives the impression that the video is slowing down. Incidentally, the images were first calibrated before publication and background noise was removed.
The Wispr instrument on board the Parker Solar Probe is used, among other things, to study the solar wind. In addition, this instrument is suitable for mapping the atmosphere of the sun, or the corona, and for photographing plasma clouds. These are huge bursts of solar wind that fire a cloud of magnetized particles that can reach Earth in one to three days. Plasma clouds are related to solar flares and can trigger the Northern Lights, but also damage satellites and cause problems for Earth’s power grids.
The Parker Solar Probe and on the right an image of Wispr taken from the point in its orbit closest to the sun
The Parker Solar Probe was launched a year ago on August 12. The probe is named after Eugene Parker, an American scientist who predicted the existence of the solar wind in 1958. The spacecraft named after him completed its first orbit around the sun in January this year and has already set several records, such as reaching a distance of 15 million miles from the sun and flying at a speed of 343,112 km/h against the sun. the sun. Those records will gradually be broken again, as the probe will orbit the sun ever closer. On August 27, the Parker Solar Probe will begin its third encounter, skimming relatively close to the sun. The perihelion is reached on September 1.
For example, with the measuring equipment on board the probe, NASA hopes to learn more about where the solar wind comes from and how it can reach speeds of up to almost 3 million km/h. The organization also wants to know why the corona is so much hotter than the surface below. To this end, the probe collects data from four different instruments. At the beginning of May, 22GB was already downloaded. This concerns data collected during the first two encounters with the sun. That amount of data was not counted on; fifty percent more data was downloaded than previously estimated. This was possible because the probe’s telecommunications system appears to work better than expected.