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NASA Plans Probe to the Sun
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.'"
Airplane 2.
The opposite of progress is congress
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.
select a few of our favorite people as crew for that mission?
I guess providing power to the device via solar power would be a good option.
After all...It will be right next to the source.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
SPF Eleventy Million
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
"That's hot!"
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
With NASA's record, they ought to have named this project "Icarus", 'cause that's what will happen to it.
1) The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
2) A gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees.
3) The sun is hot - the sun it not a place where we can live, but here on Earth there'd be no life without the light it gives.
"This won't hurt you as much as it hurts me!"
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The scientists and astrophysicists themselves agree that the Sun is going to become a Red Giant and it will expand past the orbit of Jupiter. Instead of just setting up the instruments and wait for the Sun to come to us, these typical, arrogant, pie-in-the-sky, ivory tower, disconnected elites are coming up with yet another proposal to tax and spend out tax dollars. Enough!. Just wait. What is 5 billion years to a government program? I ask.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If you go here
[snip]So wouldn't that tend to prevent anything man made from getting near the sun, much less its "surface" / chromosphere?
RS
From your own link: Though the corona's temperature is high it's molecules are so far apart that the gases release little heat. If a person were to stand on the sun's corona they wouldn't burn, they would freeze in the near vacuum of the corona.
The particles have a high temperature (are moving quickly) but the particle density is low. Therefore the heat will be small. Heat is the flow of energy from a hotter body to a cooler body.
Pffft. Everyone knows you should use metaphasic shielding.
Seriously, though, it's not quite that simple. "The area around the sun" is very hot, but it's not very dense. IANAThermalEngineer, but I imagine they have one or two at NASA, and I'm guessing that they can come up with some kind of effective radiative cooling system. (Though perhaps they'll just rely on a Thermal Protective System (aka "heat shield"), like they did for the original Solar Probe.)
NASA knows the probe will burn up in the sun, so that's why they plan to land it at night.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"I'm sorry NASA, but the Princess is in another solar system."
Day and night is caused by the rotation of the Earth.
rotation, shmotation. As anyone who's ever looked at the sun knows. the sun is roughly the size of a 50 cent piece and at night it comes to rest somewhere out west, probably arizona. Or so Calvin's dad told meSome drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Though the corona's temperature is high it's molecules are so far apart that the gases release little heat. If a person were to stand on the sun's corona they wouldn't burn, they would freeze in the near vacuum of the corona.
Oh, they'd burn alright - but it would be a really bad tan. The side facing the Sun would absorb insane amounts of radiation; the side facing away would freeze... A good example (though far away from the corona): the extreme surface temperatures of Mercury, depending on the amount of sunlight, range from around 100 K to over 700 K.
You can't have a good story about probing without mention of Uranus...
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....
Apparently a NASA spacecraft soon.
I don't feel myself rotating.
I drank what? -- Socrates
And it radiates via what medium?
Luminiferous aether, of course. Ask a silly question...
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I can see that this topic is going to spark some heated debate.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Stolen from a webpage (http://chrisdamato.blogspot.com/2007/03/ask-calvins-dad.html) from someone who stole them from someone who stole them from Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson.
Illustrating the value of a good explanation in science education!
Calvin: Why does the sun set?
Dad: It's because hot air rises. The sun's hot in the middle of the day, so it rises high in the sky. In the evening then, it cools down and sets.
Calvin: Why does it go from east to west?
Dad: Solar wind.
Calvin: Why does the sky turn red as the sun sets?
Dad: That's all the oxygen in the atmosphere catching fire.
Calvin: Where does the sun go when it sets?
Dad: The sun sets in the west. In Arizona actually, near Flagstaff. That's why the rocks there are so red.
Calvin: Don't the people get burned up?
Dad: No, the sun goes out as it sets. That's why it's dark at night.
Calvin: Doesn't the sun crush the whole state as it lands?
Dad: Ha ha, of course not. Hold a quarter up. See, the sun's just about the same size.
Calvin: I thought I read that the sun was really big.
Dad: You can't believe everything you read, I'm afraid.
Calvin: How come old photographs are always black and white? Didn't they have color film back then?
Dad: Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It's just that the world was black and white then. The world didn't turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.
Calvin: But then why are old paintings in color?! If the world was black and white, wouldn't artists have painted it that way?
Dad: Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane.
Calvin: But... But how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn't their paints have been shades of gray back then?
Dad: Of course, but they turned colors like everything else did in the '30s.
Calvin: So why didn't old black and white photos turn color too?
Dad: Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?
Calvin: Dad, will you explain the theory of relativity to me? I don't understand why time goes slower at great speed.
Dad: It's because you keep changing time zones. See, if you fly to California, you gain three hours on a five-hour flight, right? So if you go at the speed of light, you gain more time, because it doesn't take as long to get there. Of course, the theory of relativity only works if you're going west.
Calvin: Why do my eyes shut when I sneeze?
Dad: If your lids weren't closed, the force of the explosion would blow your eyeballs out and stretch the optic nerve, so your eyes would flop around and you'd have to point them with your hands to see anything.
Calvin: How do bank machines work?
Dad: Well, let's say you want 25 dollars. You punch in the amount and behind the machine there's a guy with a printing press who makes the money and sticks it out this slot.
Calvin: Sort of like the guy who lives up in our garage and opens the door?
Dad: Exactly.
Calvin: What causes the wind?
Dad: Trees sneezing.
Calvin: Why does ice float?
Dad: Because it's cold. Ice wants to get warm, so it goes to the top of liquids to be nearer to the sun.
Calvin: Is that true?
Dad: Look it up and find out.
Calvin: I should just look up stuff in the first place.
Calvin: How come you know so much?
Dad: It's all in the book you get when you become a father.
My God, It's full of star
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth