Solar probe touching the sun
Channel: world wide
Date: 2022-02-03

Launched in 2018, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe spacecraft, with instruments developed and built by UC Berkeley, has now travelled closer to the sun than any other mission in history, actually penetrating the sun’s atmosphere, to investigate highly charged magnetic field. 

Now, that data has allowed solar physicists to map the source of a major component of the solar wind that continually peppers Earth’s atmosphere, while revealing strange magnetic field reversals that could be accelerating these particles toward our planet.

These accelerated particles interact with Earth’s magnetic field, generating the colorful northern and southern lights but also potentially damaging the electrical grid and telecommunications networks on the surface, threatening orbiting satellites and perhaps endangering astronauts in space.

The more solar physicists understand about the magnetic environment of the sun and how it flings solar wind particles out toward the planets, the better they will be able to predict events to prevent damage.

“There was a major space weather event in 1859 that blew out telegraph networks on Earth and one in 1972 that set off naval mines in North Vietnam, just from the electrical currents generated by the solar storm,” said Stuart Bale, a University of California, Berkeley, professor of physics and lead author of an article about new results from the probe’s FIELDS experiment. “We’re much more of a technological society than we were in 1972, the communications networks and the power grid on Earth are extraordinarily complex, so big disturbances from the sun are potentially a very serious thing. If we could predict space weather, we could shut down or isolate parts of the power grid, or shut down satellite systems that might be vulnerable.” (Cont'd...)

(Full Story:  https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/12/04/...)

Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally (Animations and images courtesy of: NASA/JHUAPL, NASA GSFC/CIL/Brian Monroe, NASA GSFC/CIL/Krystofer Kim, Johns Hopkins University/APL/Steve Gribben)

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