[HN Gopher] Solar Orbiter passes historically close to sun on Sa...
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       Solar Orbiter passes historically close to sun on Saturday
        
       Author : Brajeshwar
       Score  : 30 points
       Date   : 2022-03-26 17:17 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (earthsky.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (earthsky.org)
        
       | theflyingelvis wrote:
       | Surely it'll do this at night when the sun's not as hot?
        
         | adhesive_wombat wrote:
         | Are you insane? You want to send the spacecraft through the
         | Arctic portal into the hollow core of the Earth after the
         | setting Sun?
         | 
         | That would be a declaration of war on the Reptilians!
        
         | vanattab wrote:
         | Naturally
        
       | inimino wrote:
       | > On this date, Solar Orbiter will be less than 1/3 the distance
       | from the sun to Earth. That's [...] about 1/3 of an astronomical
       | unit (AU).
       | 
       | Does the journalist know what an AU is?
       | 
       | For those that don't know, an AU _is_ the distance from the earth
       | to the sun, so you could just as well write:
       | 
       | "On this date, Solar Orbiter will be less than 1/3 the distance
       | from the sun to Earth. That's 29.8 million miles (48 million km)
       | or about 1/3 of the distance from the sun to Earth."
       | 
       | (And yes, since if I don't point this out someone else will,
       | strictly speaking the AU is defined as some fixed number of
       | meters. But that number wasn't pulled out of a hat...)
        
       | sbierwagen wrote:
       | While I'm sure 48 million km is "historic" for the ESA's solar
       | probe, Parker's most recent perihelion was 8.5 million km:
       | http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/index.php
       | 
       | It's planned to hit 6.9 million km in 2025. (Ten solar radii)
        
         | Victerius wrote:
         | Why not 0 km?
        
           | sbierwagen wrote:
           | While it would be fun to punt a billion dollar spacecraft
           | into the sun just to see the weird spikes on the telemetry
           | data, you can't actually get any realtime data from the probe
           | during close solar approach. Stars emit quite a lot of RF,
           | and the antenna on Parker has to be small enough to fit
           | behind the sunshield. Parker has to survive each perihelion
           | in a functional state in order to downlink readings.
           | 
           | Presumably after the end of the scheduled mission there will
           | an attempt to get funding for an extended mission to take it
           | in closer. My impression is they can't put it on the official
           | schedule if it's not funded, and speculatively funding
           | spacecraft operations decades into the future would take big
           | chunks out of NASA's budget.
        
             | jancsika wrote:
             | > While it would be fun to punt a billion dollar spacecraft
             | into the sun just to see the weird spikes on the telemetry
             | data, you can't actually get any realtime data from the
             | probe during close solar approach.
             | 
             | Such a glaring blind spot could potentially hinder law
             | enforcement to the point that visibility into future
             | investigations goes completely dark.
             | 
             | What would it take to blow up the sun?
        
         | lizardactivist wrote:
         | It's not a competition.
        
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       (page generated 2022-03-26 23:01 UTC)