“You have to have it all sorted out, predicted precisely, and timed exactly to be in the right place at the right time.”Įvery inch closer to the sun means the probe will be exposed to more excruciating heat and radiation. “To achieve the flyby, you have to know how fast you’re moving, where the orbit is, where Venus is,” Guo said. But using the same planet seven times? That’s completely new, and there’s a lot to keep track of. For instance, she used Jupiter to propel the New Horizons mission to Pluto. ![]() Guo has employed this tactic of using other planets to help move spaceships in the past. In space terms, that’s practically shaking hands. In seven years, the probe will be within four million miles of the sun’s surface. Over the next seven years, as it circles the sun, the probe will wrap around Venus seven times, each time slowing down and swooping closer to the sun. The probe will fly just close enough to Venus so that it will get pulled toward the surface, allowing it to slow down and change its path–this is called a gravity assist. To do that, the 1,400-pound probe will get a little help from Venus. The only way to get it close, Guo figures, is to slow the Parker Solar Probe way down, so it can achieve tighter orbits around the sun. “But of all the solar system explorations, it’s the most challenging.” “You might think getting to the sun is easy because it’s not far and you can see it,” she said. She and her team have mapped a journey that will bring the probe into the sun’s corona. Yanping Guo is the mission designer for the Parker Solar Probe. She has worked for the past 16 years to create a flight path for the mission at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where the probe was designed and built. Yanping Guo is the mission designer for the probe. But NASA scientists must strike the perfect balance between flying just close enough that the spacecraft can collect the data it needs but not so close that it burns up. Like Icarus of Greek mythology, the journey is a daring flight into the unknown. In early August, NASA will take on this challenge when it launches the Parker Solar Probe - a mission to fly seven times closer to the sun than any other spacecraft has before. ![]() No matter how fast we try to shoot the probe into space, its momentum will cause it to keep orbiting the sun. That’s because Earth is barreling through space at 19 miles per second, or 67,000 miles per hour. Sending a spacecraft from Earth to a stationary target like the sun is like trying to throw a dart from a speeding train.
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