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EU Sending a Probe To the Sun
First time accepted submitter Mindflux0 writes "The European Union is going forward with the proposed Solar Orbiter, a space probe designed to study the sun. The probe will orbit closer to the sun than any other man-made object at a sizzling 42 million km. It's planned to launch in 2017 for close to a billion euros."
The European Space Agency is quite different than the European Union. It includes Canada for a start...
We have told them it is safe to go to the sun as we will send them at night.
Don't worry, they're going at... DAMMIT!
Dark Reflection
First the News of the World, and now this.
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At least they should be able to power it with solar panels...
Actually, powering a probe close to the sun with solar panels is a significant difficulty, since photovoltaic cells perform poorly when they get hot; high temperatures also degrade the lifetime. The European mission will be taking a lot of steps to decrease the intensity on the solar arrays. It's a much worse problem with Solar Probe Plus, which is going much closer. For SPP, designing a power system that works at distances close to the sun was the key enabling element in the mission design. We will be using concentrator solar cells, operating them off-angle, and, for the part of the orbit closest to the sun, actually cooling the arrays with a pumped-fluid cooling loop to reject heat to radiators that are shaded from the sun.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Actually there is a such a thing as 4 x closer it's just an inaccurate natural language representation of 1/4th the distance. Not everyone uses accuracy and precision in their every day speech as their goal is to communicate general ideas now explain something with technical accuracy. Vernacular do you speak it?
Well that's true except that it is perfectly accurate and precise if you simply understand the idiom. Which of course literalist wanna-be-pedants don't, as they do with so many aspects of language, and act like this means they're smart.
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Math. Do you Speak it? There is no such thing as 4 times closer.
English. Do you speak it? If you're not a native speaker, then it's understandable that you're not familiar with some of the intricacies and oddities of the language, but for fluent speakers of English, there's no trouble parsing phrases such as "twice as short" (means the same as "half as tall"), or "four times closer" ("a quarter the distance"), etc. Just invert the number when you reverse the directional (e.g. from "closer" to "further", "shorter" to "taller", etc).
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
You do realize it that when you spend money it is not incinerated right?
If the EU spends 1 billion or 100 billion they do not have 1 billion less, it is just redistributed differently.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Exactly! Why send a probe to a distance that is not significantly closer to the sun than the earth? They are observing visible light, ultraviolet and X-rays, which could be observed from the earth or from an earth orbit.
First, you get more detail if you're close. Second, they'll also be making in situ particle and magnetic measurements and those you can't get any other way. Right now, we've got lots of conjecture about what's going on in the heliosphere close to the sun, but damn little actual data; some things you can only measure by getting an instrument to the location, other things could theoretically be measured remotely but practically can't because the instruments would be overwhelmed by the friendly local star. Without better measurements in that area, there's just no way to sort out a model of what's going on; the models that we have tell us clearly that we don't understand enough (the results they give when dealing with the area[*] close to the sun are ridiculous, so all we can do is use the models further out where they work better).
I'm not a solar physicist, but I work on a team that integrates solar data from many missions (and earth-based observatories too) and I know from talking to the solar physicists on the team that the results of this probe will be very useful.
[* That word should be "volume", but it makes the sentence sound stupid. ]
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
If you think that this kind of research is done to create jobs you're so wrong you'll need an atlas to get back.
This is expensive and difficult with a massive chance that there will be absolutely no return of any kind (because the probe melts, or the engines misfile and it ends up in the sun rather than going around it or whatever). In other words, this is exactly the type of stuff that private enterprise won't do because the risk vs return is really poor (high risk vs unknown return). So governments get convinced to try it by scientists who are doing it to try and understand our home star better in the hopes that we'll learn something from it. We might even learn something useful that betters our lot as a race, or leads to useful technological advances.
Governments _should_ spend. They should spend to cover the gaps that private enterprise won't, but that will have effects on their people or the future of their country or the world. What they should not do is privatise gains and socialise losses in the way that's happened over the last few years.
Rational thought is the only true freedom