[HN Gopher] Solar Orbiter passes historically close to sun on Sa... ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-26 23:01 UTC)