Friday, August 15, 2008

Solar Probe+ will explore sun as early as 2015

Nasa has lunched its new program to visit the sun and explore it. This will be the first time this kind of mission has been started. Solar Probe+ is going to explore sun and hopefully, solve to great mysteries about the sun :

Mystery #1—the corona: If you stuck a thermometer in the surface of the sun, it would read about 6000o C. Intuition says the temperature should drop as you back away; instead, it rises. The sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, registers more than a million degrees Celsius, hundreds of times hotter than the star below. This high temperature remains a mystery more than 60 years after it was first measured. (Dr. Tony Phillips, 2008)

Mystery #2—the solar wind: The sun spews a hot, million mph wind of charged particles throughout the solar system. Planets, comets, asteroids—they all feel it. Curiously, there is no organized wind close to the sun's surface, yet out among the planets there blows a veritable gale. Somewhere in between, some unknown agent gives the solar wind its great velocity. The question is, what? (Dr. Tony Phillips, 2008)I don't know about you guys, but for me these are exciting news. Can you believe how far our technology has developed? Solar Probe+ will come to sun as close as 7 million kilometers. This may seem really far, but actually it's not because sun is many, many times bigger than the Earth and accordingly sun's atmosphere is much thicker. I hope you are as excited as I am. If not, than just enjoy the process how science is developing. Cheers!