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NASA Plans Probe to the Sun

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the hope-they-bring-suntan-lotion dept.

FudRucker writes "For more than 400 years, astronomers have studied the sun from afar. Now NASA has decided to go there. 'We are going to visit a living, breathing star for the first time,' says program scientist Lika Guhathakurta of NASA Headquarters. 'This is an unexplored region of the solar system and the possibilities for discovery are off the charts.'"

7 of 352 comments (clear)

  1. Okay? by Drakin020 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And how exactly do you plan to do that? Do we have any material that won't melt under the intense heat?

    --
    The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
    1. Re:Okay? by Creepy+Crawler · · Score: 3, Insightful

      One could dissipate heat by having hundreds of monofilament wires to wick the heat away from such craft. Doing that should provide more time for the sensor array to gather and transmit more data.

      Of course, we could select Tom Cruise and other scientologists as crew.

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    2. Re:Okay? by CogDissident · · Score: 3, Insightful

      wick the heat "where"? The area around the sun is "all" over several thousand degrees, the size of those wires would have to be measured in hundreds of miles.

    3. Re:Okay? by Thelasko · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I should hope that the solar probe has magnetic shielding, just to get a high stress test of tech. Magnetic shielding would be advantageous. Especially since the majority of the particles coming from the sun appear to be charged. However, the objectives of the mission state that it intends to study magnetic fields and the charged particles from the sun. These objectives would be difficult to meet with magnetic shielding.

      Plus, it wasn't mentioned in TFA.
      --
      One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
  2. Re:Can we by pak9rabid · · Score: 3, Insightful

    select a few of our favorite people as crew for that mission? I have just the people
  3. That doesn't really answer the question by p3d0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The mission is 7 years long. In that time, wouldn't the heat shield reach thermal equilibrium, and become extremely hot itself, if not melt?

    Maybe they're just not going as close as we all think.

    --
    Patrick Doyle
    I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
  4. Re:there's no night on the sun by Gilmoure · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't feel myself rotating.

    --
    I drank what? -- Socrates