As NASA spacecraft orbits the sun, this scientist is excited about the future of predicting space weather

As It Happens7:15As NASA spacecraft orbits the sun, this scientist is excited about the future of predicting space weather

While most people have been relaxing and enjoying the holidays, NASA's Parker Space Probe has been working harder than ever.

On Dec. 24, the space probe hurtled through the solar atmosphere at about 692,000 km/h — the equivalent of going from New York to Tokyo in under a minute — and endured blazing temperatures of up to 982 C, according to NASA. 

NASA sent out the Parker Space Probe in 2018 to better understand the sun's outer atmosphere. The spacecraft survived the journey and is now orbiting the sun about six kilometres away from its surface.

"This is the accumulation of years and years of work, and it's really tremendous," said Eric Christian, a heliophysicist and one of the scientists working on the Parker Solar Probe at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Christian spoke with As It Happens guest host Stephanie Skenderis about the space probe's successful approach to the sun. Here is part of that conversation.

Unique NASA probe aims to unlock mysteries of the sun

13 days ago

Duration 2:06

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has made its closest fly-by of the sun yet, allowing it to collect samples that may unlock mysteries such as why the sun’s outermost layer — the corona — is so hot.

You've been working on the Parker Solar Probe mission for over 15 years. How did it feel to learn it had survived the mission?

The excitement was just tremendous. The science we're going to get from this is just going to rewrite the textbooks on our knowledge of the sun. And this is a really fun project because not only is it great science, but it's practical science. It's going to help us predict space weather in the future and really understand the only important star in the sky, which is our sun.  

What is this probe doing up there exactly?

We have a bunch of scientific instruments that measure things like the magnetic field coming from the sun, radio waves coming from the sun, the light from the solar corona, particles coming, streaming from the sun – everything from a half million miles per hour up to almost the speed of light. And from all those pieces we can put together the puzzle that lets us answer three important questions that we've had about the sun for the entire Space Age. 

One is why is the atmosphere of the sun, [what] we call the corona, hotter than the surface of the sun? Normally when you get further from a heat source, like a radiator or a fire, you get colder. How is it that getting further from the sun, you get hotter? 

Also, the solar wind streams out – its electrically charged particles [stream] out from the sun in all directions at a million miles an hour. How are those accelerated? The Earth and all the planets live in that solar wind, and they're an important part of space weather, so understanding how they get accelerated helps us predict them better. 

And third, which is the part of the science that I'm most interested in, is that the sun not only has these million-mile-per-hour particles, but it's got much faster particles that are moving at a good fraction of the speed of light, that we call solar energetic particles. And those are the radiation that's dangerous to satellites, to astronauts, and can even affect us here down on Earth. And understanding how those are accelerated is what the instrument that I helped design and build is used for.

The probe got about six kilometres away from the surface of the sun. What did it have to endure to get there? I mean, I get extreme heat, but what else did it have to go through?  

It turns out that things that orbit very close to the sun are moving very, very fast. And so Parker Solar Probe is also the fastest spacecraft that mankind has ever built. Because it's moving so fast, a little tiny piece of dust smaller than a grain of sand can have the impact of a bullet. And we've already seen some dust impacts, and they hit our heat shield regularly. 

It's a very inhospitable environment, but the spacecraft was designed to handle it.

How can better understanding the sun's atmosphere actually help us? What impact could this have for our everyday lives on Earth?

Space weather affects us actually here on the Earth. It can affect communications, especially for airlines flying over the poles. And probably the most dangerous thing here on Earth is that it can affect our power grid.

A solar storm has, in the past, done damage to our power grid. And a big storm in the future, as we get more reliant on technology, could take out the GPS system or take down the power grid. So understanding the science of the sun helps us better predict space weather that could affect us. 

We're way behind on [understanding] space weather [compared to] where we are in terrestrial weather, and partially [it] is because it's so hard to measure space weather. The analogy I use is it's like trying to determine the weather on the entire Pacific Ocean only having three weather stations. So the more we understand about the sun, the better we can predict space weather, and that helps us better protect ourselves from power grid failures, from communications failures, from satellite damage and from astronaut damage.

What's next for the probe and what's next for your research?

We're just going to get the data from this very close pass over the next week or so. But the spacecraft is going to continue to orbit the sun, getting this same distance about three times a year. And we're hoping that continues for another 10 to 15 years or more.

Every time we get closer, we learn a little bit more because the sun is always changing. And so it's like weather. You don't want to measure for just one minute what the weather is going to be — that doesn't help you predict long term. You want your weather station to be working for years to actually understand how weather changes.

The sun goes through cycles, has solar active periods — which is what we're in now, when there are a lot more storms — and solar quiet periods, when there's a lot less sunspots and storms. So we're going to want to go through that, just like you want to have your weather station go through a calm day, sunny day and a storm. And we're going to continue to take science data on Parker Solar Probe and on other missions until we can predict space weather.