NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flew right through a massive solar eruption and caught the whole thing on camera. It’s the first up-close footage ever captured of a solar explosion like this.
The video, released by scientists at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, features an especially powerful coronal mass ejection that took place last year.
CMEs are large explosions of super-hot plasma that erupt from the sun’s atmosphere. They consist of charged particles that can trigger radio blackouts and cause other mayhem if they strike Earth.
NASA said that the CME that struck the Parker Solar Probe was “one of the most powerful coronal mass ejections ever recorded.”
Lucky for those scientists currently studying the sun, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flew right through the CME and survived it, capturing the event on camera.
According to Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, CMEs can fire magnetic fields sometimes expelling billions of tons of plasma anywhere from 60-to-1,900 miles per second.
As for the one last September, Parker “clocked particles accelerating up to 840 miles per second,” according to Johns Hopkins.
The Parker Solar Probe’s mission to touch the sun
The Parker Solar Probe was designed specifically to study the sun. Not only is it the fastest spacecraft in history, but it’s also the one that can come closest to the sun, within 4 million miles of its surface, and survive the journey, according to NASA.
The Probe is specifically designed to withstand the scorching temperatures near the sun and is fitted with a custom heat shield as well as an autonomous system that protects the device from the sun’s light emissions, per NASA.
When Parker first detected the CME, it was about 5.7 million miles from the sun’s surface, according to Johns Hopkins.
Later, the probe “passed into the structure, crossing the wake of its leading edge (or shock wave), and then finally exited through the other side.” It spent almost two days studying this one CME and came out unscathed, according to Johns Hopkins.
“We knew from the beginning that Parker Solar Probe would fly through CMEs. That was part of the science objectives when the mission was established, so we designed the spacecraft from the start with an eye to surviving and, better yet, performing the science mission while in a CME,” Jim Kinnison, the Parker Solar mission systems engineer at APL, said in a Johns Hopkins statement.
“All in all, Parker proved itself to be robust and pretty tough, and all the hard work done in the design phase paid off,” Kinnison added.
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