(dramatic music)
The sun at the center of the solar system
is an incredibly hot object.
This hot raging ball of gas.
The atmosphere is so much hotter
than actually the surface and we don't know why.
In order to be able to truly see the sun
the interior, the surface, the atmosphere,
we have to go into space.
We have had spacecraft that have gone in
as far as the planet Mercury.
Mercury is known as the planet of extremes.
It is the planet that formed closest to the sun.
The day side of Mercury plus 450 degrees,
the night side about minus 180.
It's so close to the sun,
the dynamics are so much more powerful.
Mercury is the easiest place to get to
in our solar system where we can measure
the space weather, solar wind
coupling with the planetary magnetic field.
We've identified a coupling object.
If it turns out that calculation's wrong
the mission doesn't succeed.
It transpired a new discovery had been made.
We have found what we believe is ice at Mercury.
We're gonna go to the most extreme environment
in our entire solar system.
We're gonna go in and we're gonna touch the sun.
Three, two, one, zero.
(dramatic music)
This is the story
of the exploration of the sun
told by those who dared to do it.
The latest step in our quest to uncover
the secrets of the sun and the mysteries of Mercury.
That's goodbye, spacecraft.
(dramatic music)
Humanity, I think, has a general quest
for knowledge.
We tend to just ask questions and wonder why.
The nature is to look up and to look around you
and to want to understand your surroundings.
And so the first thing anyone looked up
and wandered about was the sun.
Studying the sun has always been difficult,
mainly because it's so bright.
It burns out your eyes, it burns out photographic plates,
it burns out everything if you don't do it carefully.
It think it's been over the years,
seen as at sometimes friend and at other times as foe.
Described in literature and in art
as being a fiery warlord of the solar system.
Giver of life but then during solar eclipses,
all the civilizations were fearful
that the sun wouldn't come back
because they relied on it so much.
The sun is a constant in our lives.
It rises every morning, it sets every night
and yet when you look at the sun
you will see that it is anything but constant,
it is a continually changing, incredibly active star.
Chinese astronomers were among the first
to record the sun's behavior some 2,800 years ago.
They noted that dark patches sometimes appeared
on it's surface and then disappeared.
But it would take the invention of the telescope
for humans to truly to begin
to unravel the mysteries of our star.
In the summer of 1610, amazingly and somewhat foolishly
we would say today, Thomas Harriet
looked through a telescope directly at the sun.
So he did this in the early morning
when there was mist on the horizon,
so the sun's light was diminished
but he looked at the sun directly
and saw on the surface black spots.
The record that he left for us was a drawing of the sun
with spots on the surface.
But then the most famous observer of sunspots is Galileo
and he made absolutely fantastic intricate drawings
of sunspots and he monitored, in particular
over the summer of 1612
allowing us to see where the sunspots were forming,
he was able to show that the sun rotated.
He was able to show that the sun rotated
at different rates depending on the latitude of the sun
and he really showed us
that yes the sun is not this perfect object,
it is blemished, but it is interesting and it's changing.
Galileo thought that the sunspots
were most likely clouds forming in the sun's atmosphere.
Then 200 years later an entirely different set
of observations began to hint
that the earth and the sun might have some kind
of mysterious invisible connection.
(dramatic music)
In 1806, a Prussian explorer and geographer
called Alexander Humboldt.
He noticed that during a night
where there was a strong display of the aurora
his compass needle veered away from it's normal bearing.
Then when the aurora display subsided,
the compass went back to it's previous position.
In fact from May of that year until June 1807
he took compass readings every half an hour
from midnight till morning.
And in his work he discovered a phenomenon
that he called a magnetic storm.
Today we call it a geomagnetic storm,
a disturbance of the earth's magnetic field.
Humboldt concluded that whatever was behind the aurora
the northern and southern lights
was a having a magnetic impact on the earth.
As investigations into the mysteries
of the sun continued more
and more strange phenomena was seen.
In 1859, Richard Carrington, a wealthy brewer
in Surry, in England, his passion was
to watch the sun everyday and draw what he saw
on the surface.
And he noticed one day in early September
when he was drawing his sunspots,
that he saw these two bright regions form,
they sort of flared into brightness.
And he was so shocked he rushed off
to find somebody to come and collaborate
what he'd seen, amazing new discovery,
no one had ever seen that before,
he wanted a second opinion.
But by the time he got back,
the white flaring spots had diminished in brightness
and they'd moved.
At the same time, in London's Sky Garden Observatory,
an extremely sensitive device called a magnetometer
that monitors the earth's magnetic field
registered a sudden anomaly.
Then 17 and a half hours later, the aurora break out.
Across the United States and England
and various other places,
in India where they had telegraph systems,
they all stopped working.
They generated hundreds of volts of electricity
on these lines.
There was a person in Washington
that was nearly electrocuted.
Apparently another telegraph station was burned down
in Connecticut.
The Aurora Borealis which normally
hides up in the arctic regions
could now be seen in Cuba almost directly overhead.
In Japan they were reporting deep crimson red aurora.
Miners up in Pike's Peak in Colorado
basically broke camp at one in the morning
thinking that it was daylight,
you know they were fixing breakfast. (laughs)
'Cause it was so light.
So when Richard Carrington saw something on the sun
and people directly saw and temporarily correlated
the same time an event of the earth,
they started to think,
yeah there is something going on here.
(slow music)
Carrington described his observations
of solar flares at the Royal Astronomical Society
in London that November.
It was the first time an event on the sun's surface
had been directly linked to events on the earth
but the cause of this strange connection
remained a mystery until the invention of new technologies.
The real revolution for astronomy didn't really happen
until the advent of photography,
beginning with the daguerroeotype method.
(dramatic music)
And that was adapted for telescopic use
(dramatic music)
and finally the first photograph of the sun was taken.
Georgia Ellery Hale in the late 1890's
was the first to develop an instrument
called the spectroheliograph,
where basically he selected a spectral line,
I think it was H-alpha the atomic hydrogen line
and he scanned that line on a photographic plate
to build up an image of the sun
seen only in the light of that particular transition
of that atom.
And so all of a sudden that reduced the brightness
of the sun by a million times
and now you can just image the sun
and see this glowing ring of light.
(dramatic music)
Using this technique,
Hale established that there was strong magnetic fields
in sunspots on the sun's surface.
Other technology was used to unravel the sun's secrets,
it resulted in an even more puzzling discovery.
That hazy atmosphere that you see
during a total solar eclipse,
the sun's corona is hotter than the surface of the sun.
And that really doesn't make sense,
it breaks the laws of physics.
You move away from a hot body, it should get colder
but something is happening in this region
that really heats this material up to incredible heat.
And we don't know why if it's that hot
why does the gas stay on the sun?
Hot materials move really fast
and if the gas molecules are traveling faster
than escape velocity, there should be a wind
streaming away from the sun.
And this radical idea was predicted
by an American astronomer Eugene Parker.
In 1958, space was thought to be a hard vacuum
and while the light and heat from the sun
could pass through space, the enormous gravity of the sun
would prevent any matter such as gas from reaching us.
But Parker thought differently.
In the 1950's, people thought that space was empty
and it's vacuums void, there's nothing in it whatsoever.
The idea was contradicted by several observations.
He went through the mathematics,
he went through the physics and he predicted
the hot atmosphere of the sun
has high pressure so the gas is wanting to push outwards,
meanwhile the gravitational pull of the sun
is trying to hold the gas in
so you have this competition of forces.
And if you go up in height in the atmosphere of the sun
you get to a point where the gravitational pull
is not able to overcome the outward push of the hot gas.
And there's a really important consequence of that.
The gas streams out into the solar system,
the sun is literally expanding into space.
I realized that we had the supersonic expansion
of the outer atmosphere of the sun.
A completely radical idea.
Eugene wrote up a scientific paper,
submitted it to the Astrophysical Journal
and it got rejected.
Hardly anybody took it seriously.
I received several polite and not so polite declinations.
What Eugene Parker realized was that the sun is so hot
that the atoms are moving so quickly
that some of them can actually escape from the sun
and his calculations suggested the sun should be constantly
losing gas, streaming away to make a wind.
It was too revolutionary to think
that the previous view of a sun held together by gravity
in it's entirety was not actually true.
Parker asked the then editor
of the Astrophysical Journal, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
to look at his paper again.
Chandrasekhar couldn't find any mathematical flaws
in Parker's work.
Chandra studied stars for many years,
in fact he goes on to win a Nobel prize
looking at the lifetimes of stars.
He looks at the math, he looks at the physics.
The editor said to Eugene, so do you really think
there's something in the work you've done?
And he said yes and the editor published it.
But still it's ridiculed.
Just because the paper was published
it had no positive effect, they were not behind it
because they just believed it was wrong.
Three, two, one, zero.
(rocket blasting)
Four years after I made the proposal,
there was a spacecraft going to Venus.
When Mariner Two flew by Venus in December 1962,
it became the first successful mission to an other planet.
During the journey it made another first,
it measured the density and composition
of a constant stream of particles racing out from the sun.
And they did indeed discover that the sun
does have this outflow of gas coming from it.
The solar wind does exist.
The rest is history.
(dramatic music)
This discovery was momentous, all of a sudden space
is no longer a void, it's no longer a vacuum,
it's filled with material, it's filled with this wind
from the sun.
The speed of the solar winds, it's almost beyond belief.
It's moving between 250 and 750 kilometers per second
and it has some real significant effects on our planet.
The earth sort of protects itself
from the large dynamic forces of solar wind
through this fairly stiff magnetic field that it has.
In the direction of the sun,
the magnetic field gets compressed and strengthened.
On the midnight part of the earth directly opposite
the magnetic field gets stretched out
into a comet like tail.
That tail actually can snap and reconnect itself identically
and that causes a flow of particles into the polar regions
of the earth and that's why we have the aurora.
(dramatic music)
So the first time I really understood
that the sun was having a big impact on our planet
was when I first saw the northern lights
and I was out in Sweden in Kurina
in the freezing cold winter and I looked up
and just saw this incredible curtain of green and red light
and it literally looked like sort of cinema curtains
billowing in the wind.
When I actually stood on the ground looking up
and watching the aurora, I was like, wow, (laughs)
this is amazing.
And the sudden thought of everything I'm looking at
is being driven by what has come from the sun
through the solar wind and is impacting
with our planet's magnetic field.
(dramatic music)
Orbiting solar observatories
carry a number of complex experiments,
advised by scientists in NASA.
The Orbiting Solar Observatory
were eight missions in a series.
They were launched from the early 1960's
towards the end of the 1970's.
Collectively these missions gave
a longer term opportunity to study the activity of the sun.
There was an instrument on board that allows
you to view the sun using an artificial solar eclipse.
So place a disc in front of the sun
block out it's dazzling light
and monitor the extended atmosphere around the sun.
(dramatic music)
In 1971, some sort of smudges were noticed in these images.
It transpired that a new discovery had been made.
Today we call them coronal mass ejections.
Huge amounts of gas and by huge up to
about two million tons of gas
ejected in filament that moves very rapidly
away from the sun.
These are like bowling balls of gas
being thrown away from the sun towards the planets.
13, 12, 11, 10--
Skylab made some of the first detailed
observations of the coronal massive ejection events.
Four, three, two, one, zero.
The Skylab mission was a human space flight mission.
It was an orbiting laboratory.
All the astronauts had been trained in solar physics
before they launched
and they were operating solar telescopes
that were on board this fantastic space station.
(dramatic music)
One of the real successes of Skylab
comes from the number of coronal mass ejections
that the mission observed.
Long term observations really showed
just how active the sun is
and we can see that these eruptions
are basically the massive amount being ejected
into the solar system at speeds
of millions of miles an hour,
maybe even up to 3,000 kilometers a second.
They are phenomenally energetic events.
(dramatic music)
Whenever I see the images from Skylab,
I'm always in awe because it strikes me
just how beautiful the sun is,
how much structure the atmosphere has
but also how dynamic the sun is.
There are images of eruptions that are absolutely vast.
And I always have in mind how dwarfed we are by the sun.
The power of the sun and the complexity of the sun
and the beautiful structures of the sun
are all encapsulated in those images.
(dramatic music)
That allowed us to understand the events of 1859,
the so-called Carrington event
because we realize that the sun can reach out to us
in a different way.
The discovery of this huge mystery
of all this charged material on earth,
it is coronal mass ejection
and that what happened in 1859, the Carrington event.
And there have been a number of near Carrington events.
In 2012, there was a Carrington level coronal mass ejection
event that just missed the earth.
As we move to a society that's more and more dependent
upon technology we become more vulnerable to space weather.
(dramatic music)
With space weather it's extremely theoretical
until your city goes into a blackout
for a couple of weeks at a time.
That hasn't happened yet
but if we have a Carrington level super storm
that event is likely to be very, very real
and quite deadly as well.
A Carrington level event has been predicted now
to cause trillions of dollars worth of damage,
could wipe out power grids.
It can cause GPS malfunctions, satellite instrumentation
to be damaged, satellites to change their altitude,
it can cause high doses of radiation
to any astronauts out there
but we never see that big event
because they very rarely happen.
So the reason I want to study Mercury
is because Mercury sees that Carrington size event everyday.
(dramatic music)
It's so close to the sun, the dynamics are so much
more powerful, I can study the physics
behind the interaction
and if I can understand that physics of Mercury
I can apply that knowledge to the earth.
Mercury is known as the planet of extremes.
It is the planet that formed closest to the sun.
One of the things that we do in planetary science
is fly by and the fly by enables us
to do initial reconnaissance to determine
if we wanna come back.
For Mercury, it's first fly by Mariner 10
really was exciting.
Mariner was launched in 1973.
The journey there is very complex.
You have this issue of not being sucked into the sun
so what we do is lapse of the solar system
until our spacecraft and Mercury are in the same orbit
and then we use a little bit of power at the last minute
to be captured by Mercury's gravity
and it took three fly bys of Mercury.
We didn't really know what we might find.
(dramatic music)
And they produced a lot of surprises.
They encountered strong magnetic fields.
It surprised us, Mercury has a magnetic field,
wow who would have thought
then they saw the magnetic field looked like a magnetic tail
just like they see at earth.
Because they were fly bys and they took images
of the surface spanning around 44%
they gave us a snapshot in time
but we've got no idea about the global picture
of Mercury and so we couldn't really get a good idea
about that until we sent the next mission of the orbiter.
Mariner 10 comes back and says oh, we're seeing things
here that contradict our previous understanding.
Then when resources are available and conditions
are favorable, they go back
and they do a mission of exploration
and that's what Messenger was.
Six, five, four, three, main engine start,
two, one and zero and lift off of Messenger
on NASA's mission to Mercury.
When I became the head of planetary science,
Messenger had launched and it was on it's way to Mercury.
Messenger was all about exploring the full surface
that we've never seen before
but also we had to really think about how
we develop our technology to survive this environment.
It's much more extreme than other planets
in our solar system.
I think one of the main concerns with us with an orbiter
is we go from one side to the other
in a very short time period, a few tens of minutes,
the day side of Mercury plus 450 degrees,
the night side about -118.
So the extreme in temperatures over 600 degrees
swing between one side and the other.
So the gradient in temperature is huge
and trying to build an instrument
that takes precise scientific measurements
is a huge challenge, a huge engineering challenge.
Messenger orbited Mercury every 12 hours.
In the four years from 2011 to 2015,
it took more than 200,000 images of it's surface.
What Messenger did was it provided
as it's top science priority,
a high resolution image of the entire surface of Mercury.
But the mystery was that there were bright spots,
there were small bright spots
and in order for the radar
to produce a bright high intensity reflection
there were thought to be two possibilities.
First possibility is that you have
a highly electrically conducting material.
The other possibility is you might
have a natural geologic formations.
But it was very hard to imagine,
nobody's ever seen any kind of geology that would do that.
And then one of the Messenger scientists
took all of the bright spots
in the ground based radar measurements
and laid them down on the map of Mercury.
Every single bright spot that was detected from the earth
was inside of a crater that is permanently shadowed.
We have found what we believe is ice,
water ice at Mercury which is really close to the sun.
It's in one of the hottest regions in our solar system.
So how did the ice get in there?
Has it been through meteor strikes
'cause meteors have water?
Has it been through comets hitting the body,
comets have a lot of water.
It's really an enigma.
It used to be thought that earth is the cradle for life,
therefore all organic chemistry in the solar system
is probably concentrated in the band
that the earth's orbit maps out around the sun.
But we're not studying the water cycle
literally throughout the solar system.
At one extreme, again planet of extremes,
you have mercury, where despite the huge temperatures,
you actually do have some water trapping
and the rest of the solar system
we're seeing huge reservoirs of water
tied up in the ice planets, the moons.
So when you're talking about where life is
and where the kind of chemistry and ultimately biology
that might produce something like us could take place,
at the moment, it's looking like it might be broader
than just one little planet at the Goldilocks distance.
We knew that Messenger was not going to go on forever.
We had our nominal mission lifetime in a single year
and our spacecraft survived incredibly well,
survived four and a half years
but there had to be a point
where the mission came to an end.
Let's end it by impacting the planet.
Now why would we do that?
And that's because European Space Agency
has a mission called BepiColumbo
that's going to Mercury next
and it's gonna answer some of the questions
that Messenger left behind.
And one of the things that we wanna know about
is when we open the surface up, from an impact,
from a new impact, what are we gonna find?
Now we really have an excellent idea
as to where we crashed it,
'cause we did approve doing that.
I signed off on it or it wouldn't have happened
(laughs) and we crashed it, left a big hole
and so we really are gonna be able to tell BepiColumbo
where to look for it.
And I think some new science will come out of that,
that's the hope.
(dramatic music)
One of the things that Mercury tells us
and Messenger did is by looking carefully at it's orbit
and how it's changing,
the sun must be losing mass.
We know by studying other stars
that the sun's evolution will lead it
into a phase called red giant
where the surface will balloon out to perhaps
further than the orbit of earth
and when that happens all life on this planet
will be extinguished.
Now when is that?
By really looking at the evolution based
on our observations of Mercury,
we can really find tune those answers
and determine how the sun is evolving over time.
This is really spectacular when you think about it.
Understanding our star by looking at individual planets.
The Soho mission launched in 1995.
10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three,
two, one, ignition and lift off of Soho in the atmosphere
on a international mission of solar physics.
It was a really significant mission
because it carried a whole suite of telescopes
that enabled us to probe the sun inside and out.
It made the closest observations yet of the surface
of the sun that really showed how the sun is sculpted
by magnetic fields.
One of the big, exciting outcomes of the Soho mission
has been the development in our understanding
of how corona mass ejections work.
Soho over the years has literally observed thousands
of them because we had this continuous view of the sun.
And we understood that they are eruptions
of magnetic field that carry mass into the solar system.
So Soho has really enabled us to sort of work more
on that sun-earth connection through these eruptions
that can come our way.
The other big discovery that Soho helped us make
was the understanding about the internal mechanisms
inside the sun.
It sounds really counter-intuitive to say
that we can look inside the sun
because we know when we look at images,
we can see through the atmosphere down into the surface
but we can't directly see inside.
So when we say see inside the sun,
we're actually referring to a technique
in which we use sound waves to see, to probe inside the sun.
So the sun is this huge ball of gas
and it has sound waves that bounce around on the inside.
And when those sound waves come to the surface,
they make the surface breathe,
we're able to decipher the sounds
and from that we're able to decipher
what the conditions are like inside the sun.
One of the most remarkable things about Soho
is it's one of the toughest little spacecrafts
in NASA's fleet.
It's still there today and the mission has been extended
until around 2022 and we should all be thankful
because Soho is our guardian,
it monitors the sun, it's our early warning system
of coronal mass ejections of geomagnetic storms.
We have ignition and we have lift off
of NASA's Genesis spacecraft
on a mission to retrieve a piece of the sun.
Genesis launched in 2001.
It's aim is to measure the composition of the solar wind,
so the composition of the sun
and the different layers of the sun.
Now previous missions have done this from a distance
but Genesis is actually gonna collect some of the sun
that's come to it and bring it back to earth
because on earth in a laboratory
we can measure compositions extremely accurately.
(dramatic music)
The composition of the sun is really important to understand
because the mass of the sun compared to the planets
is absolutely huge and if we know the composition of the sun
we know the composition of the solar system as a whole.
The spacecraft has located a very special point
where the sun's gravity balances the earth's gravity
and there it sat for 850 days
collecting the solar wind,
collecting these charged particles from the sun
and then collectors were closed
and it flies back to earth to land in a desert in Oregon.
Have a good visual on the target.
Genesis probe has fallen through the atmosphere
and it gets to 33 kilometers above the ground
and this is when the drope parachute is supposed to deploy
and it doesn't.
There is nothing to slow this spacecraft down.
And on mission Maidrin CCP advise
from our vantage point we do not see a drope chute,
negative drope.
345, it looks like we have no chute sir,
sector 200-- Mission manager.
Look for an impact.
(dramatic music) (crashing)
(helicopter engines)
And we have a bit visual on the impacted vehicle
on the surface.
The parachutes failed to deploy,
the probe split into two and that horrible desert mud
enters the spacecraft, the thing is shattered.
The disappointment around the scientific community is huge.
The information that we have here
from people on the ground is that nothing deployed
and therefore they're treating it as a live spacecraft.
After this dreadful failure they go to the desert
and they pick out little tiny pieces of glass
and were picking out little bits of the collectors
and they actually managed to clean the collectors
and perform these really detailed analysis.
And actually the mission achieved all of it's objectives.
It measured the composition of the sun,
it measured the composition of the solar wind,
it measured the composition of these mass ejections
and it measured the isotopic composition of the sun.
And it was incredible, it did everything we wanted it
to do but it just did it in pieces.
Study of the sun is incredibly important.
We rely on it for light and heat
and we are so dependent on our star for our survival
we really need to understand.
The solar probe is the next big challenge,
it's the next ambitious mission that we've ever done.
Because we're gonna go to the most extreme environment
in our entire solar system.
We're gonna go in and we're gonna touch the sun.
There are still so many things to understand about the sun.
There are some huge mysteries.
We already knew that the corona's a million degrees
but how come?
The solar probe is gonna get closer to the sun
than any spacecraft ever has.
It's gonna be within 10 radii
that's within the outer parts
of the atmosphere of the sun.
It's touching our star.
It really is because we have worked so hard
over the 60 years since Gene first wrote his paper
to really hone the technology that's needed
to do this kind of mission.
It really is an incredibly ambitious mission.
So I actually did have the pleasure of taking Gene
into the clean room at the John Hopkins applied physics lab
where we did most of the assembly and a lot of the testing.
And it was a really nice moment of taking him in
and seeing his reaction to this incredible piece
of technology that was going to go and do this mission
that he'd really kind of fathered.
And so he got very emotional in the clean room
and watching some of the engineering team
that was in there that I introduced him to
and it was like they were meeting a rockstar.
And they were very excited to be meeting him,
he was very excited to be meeting them
and so it was a lovely moment to just say,
this is your spacecraft and she's going
into the solar wind and into the corona
and hearing the instruments
that are gonna make the measurements.
Everybody seems to be in good spirits.
I think everybody loves working on this mission so,
look at the happy smiles all around.
And so having that time with him
and again watching him get just he was mind blown
at the technology he was looking at
and the first thing he did was immediately
give credit to all of the engineers
for their work on that spacecraft
and he even said to me, really Nicky, I just wrote a paper.
And I said, yeah, it's a pretty good paper, though Gene.
And he said yeah, if it turns out that I'm wrong
in what I've predicted I can just write another paper.
He said but if one of your engineers
has got any of their calculations wrong,
the mission doesn't succeed.
And so he said the pressure on you guys
is just intense and seeing the way you've risen up
to every challenge, he said is just amazing.
And that I think his favorite phrase
was I take my hat off to the men and women
of the solarprobe team.
Nice to meet you and good luck with everything.
Thank you so much. Thanks again.
It's by far the most ambitious solar physics mission
we've ever had and in fact it has a really fitting name.
I was sitting in my office one day,
the phone rang, I picked it up,
it was Tom Serbokin and he said NASA is contemplating
putting your name on a solar probe,
did I have any objection
and I was sort of astonished
and I guess I sort of mumbled back well yeah, I guess so.
I was sitting there in my office thinking
my god, what have we gotten into now?
The Parker Solar Probe named after the person
who predicted the existence of the solar wind.
The first time we ever named a mission
after a living scientist and absolutely appropriate
that it has this name.
(dramatic music)
That discovery of the solar wind,
he was so visionary, he made this amazing discovery.
He started a whole new branch of science,
the physics of our sun.
(dramatic music)
I had not been present at a launch
but of course we've all seen it on TV.
We were invited to a location which had a clear view
of the launch but over six miles away.
It's three o'clock in the morning.
Eight, seven, six, five, four,
three, two, one (screaming)
lift off of the mighty Delta 4 heavy rocket
with NASA's Parker Solar Probe,
a daring mission to shed light on the mysteries
of our closest star, the sun.
Wow, go baby go!
The sky lights up and very slowly
this luminous bubble rises up and booms off,
you realize that it's never coming back. (laughs)
(applause and cheers)
What a way to start. Yeah.
Here it comes.
That's goodbye spacecraft, so long fellows.
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Nothing on Parker Solar Probe was easy.
Everything was challenging,
you're going into this extreme temperature,
you've got a lot of solar pressure,
you've got a huge amount of heat coming just from the light
on the sun because you're so close to it.
We used Venus to do our gravity assist.
It's a little bit like a hambraic turn,
it's counterintuitive because we don't use the planet
to increase our speed as a lot of missions do.
We actually use it to slow down a little bit,
we give energy to Venus but very generous.
So it slows down and turns the craft in a little more
towards the sun and so that helps us
sort of trim our orbits.
And we do 24 of them very close to the sun on one side
out around the planet Venus on the other
and then do that trim maneuver just to keep making
that orbit smaller and smaller
so she will actually get closer and closer to the sun
with each one of those orbits.
So the idea of designing that mission,
getting all those trajectories in place,
getting all those maneuvers,
knowing exactly when to fire the thruster,
that's an incredibly challenging thing to do.
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She has to be incredibly independent.
She has to look after herself
because it takes light eight minutes to travel
from the sun to the earth,
we don't have time to joystick the mission
if she's in trouble, she needs to take corrective action.
The programming of the corrective action,
everything is challenging lightweight materials
so that you can stand up to these incredible heat.
Everything was a big challenge with this mission.
(dramatic music)
Parker Solar Probe today has completed two of the flybys
through the sun's corona.
We're in a very good location where the earth
can see the spacecraft and actually down link
all of our data so we just started seeing
some of the incredible images
and some of the secrets that have been unlocked
in these data sets.
So we're scientists, we get excited about wiggly line plots
and we've seen some of the plots
and I've actually heard scientists kind of gasp
because it's just not quite what you thought
or it doesn't fit any of the simple models.
There are so much in there and it's going to take
a long time to kind of unravel all the mysteries
that are in these data sets.
Right now we're in a region where we can do corotation
so that means that the spacecraft
is sitting above the same part of the sun
and as the spacecraft is moving,
the sun is rotating and we're actually getting some time
where it was sitting over the same part of the sun
for a long time.
And so we're excited about all of the different types
of science, the different ways
that we can operate the spacecraft
and the again, teasing out the science
that is really appropriate for wherever we are in the orbit.
It tends to be visionaries like Parker
who are responsible for some of the greatest leap forwards
in science.
It's people who can really see the simple parts
of the problem, the things that really matter.
I think that the whole Parker Solar Probe science team
feels a tremendous responsibility to answer these questions
that have been around for decades
but I also think that missions really do inspire
the next generation of scientists.
If you look at a NASA mission it has such an incredible
diverse group of people that have a common goal
and so I don't think you necessarily need to aspire
to be a rocket scientist or a propulsion engineer,
you can be anything you want
and really work on a NASA mission.
They make us explore these tremendous concepts
that ultimately are gonna be our future.
They will provide the future science
that allows humanity to survive and thrive.
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