Closer To The Sun Than Ever Before - See The Parker Solar Probes View - video Dailymotion

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NASA’s Parker Solar Probe made the closest flyby of the sun ever made by a spacecraft in Dec. 25.  See the views it captured of the sun's atmosphere during the flyby.   Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Joy Ng

Transcript

00:00Lift off of the mighty Delta IV heavy rocket with NASA's Parker Solar Probe.

00:06Ever since NASA's Parker Solar Probe launched into space in 2018,

00:11it has been circling closer and closer to the sun and taking images along the way.

00:17In December 2024, it made its record-breaking closest approach to the sun.

00:23That's when it took these historic close-ups of the solar atmosphere,

00:27images that are changing the way we understand our star.

00:31With images like these ones, we are actually going to have this poor understanding

00:37of how the solar atmosphere works, and in particular,

00:40to try to predict the solar activity and mitigate its impacts.

00:45The images were taken by the spacecraft's Wide Field Imager for Solar Probe, or WISPR,

00:51which observes space in visible light.

00:54WISPR doesn't look at the sun directly. Instead, it captures solar material just as it comes off of the sun.

01:01When it took these images, the spacecraft was only 3.8 million miles from the sun's surface.

01:07If Earth and the sun were one foot apart, Parker Solar Probe was about half an inch from the sun.

01:13At that distance, the spacecraft was immersed in the solar atmosphere known as the corona.

01:19Here, streams of electrically charged particles float outward from the sun at over a million miles per hour,

01:26forming the solar wind that fills the entire solar system.

01:30These images reveal previously unseen details at the origin of the solar wind.

01:35The amount of clarity and the amount of details that we got from Parker Solar Probe is totally unprecedented.

01:41But also, we see phenomena that you didn't really see before.

01:44And that's where the fun begins.

01:46If you look closely, you can see key features in the images.

01:49This is a collision of three large outbursts of solar material known as coronal mass ejections, or CMEs.

01:58The most impactful events, multiple events that are one following the others,

02:04and understanding that interaction between CMEs will help us also have another view of their potency for space weather.

02:12When the most impactful eruptions reach Earth, they can trigger auroras.

02:17But they can also harm satellites, disrupt power grids, and expose astronauts to dangerous radiation.

02:23On the far left, there's another key feature.

02:26This region marks an important structure known as the heliospheric current sheet.

02:32If we zoom out and look at the sun from the side,

02:35the current sheet looks like a twirling skirt that extends out from the sun and across the solar system.

02:41This invisible current sheet is a boundary separating where the solar wind's magnetic field changes direction from north to south.

02:49It surrounds the whole sun, and it never disappears.

02:54That's actually one of the regimes of the solar wind that we have to understand.

02:58The current sheet is important to study because it can affect how impactful eruptions can be at Earth.

03:04We've never seen these phenomena in such detail before.

03:08And scientists are continuing to study these images to piece together how the sun affects Earth and the rest of the solar system.

03:16Parka Solar Probe is opening our eyes on a new reality about our star to sun.

03:22It is rewriting the textbooks for us.

03:24Parka Solar Probe is opening our eyes on a new reality.

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Closer To The Sun Than Ever Before - See The Parker Solar Probes View

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