Towards the end, it says: > “After launch, Parker Solar Probe will detect the position of the Sun, align the thermal protection shield to face it and continue its journey for the next three months, embracing the heat of the Sun and protecting itself from the cold vacuum of space.” What a phenomenal piece of engineering! The article was not only fascinating to read as a non-astronomer/lay person, but it also makes it…
Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?
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Re: Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?
#112Towards the end, it says: > “After launch, Parker Solar Probe will detect the position of the Sun, align the thermal protection shield to face it and continue its journey for the next three months, embracing the heat of the Sun and protecting itself from the cold vacuum of space.” What a phenomenal piece of engineering! The article was not only fascinating to read as a non-astronomer/lay person, but it also makes it…
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't space actually not cold at all -- there's barely any matter there to have a temperature?
Re: Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?
#113Towards the end, it says: > “After launch, Parker Solar Probe will detect the position of the Sun, align the thermal protection shield to face it and continue its journey for the next three months, embracing the heat of the Sun and protecting itself from the cold vacuum of space.” What a phenomenal piece of engineering! The article was not only fascinating to read as a non-astronomer/lay person, but it also makes it…
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't space actually not cold at all -- there's barely any matter there to have a temperature?
Seems the answer is that you don't need matter for heat radiation.
Re: Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
For sure, but it would be a shame if NASA lost confidence and trust (and possibly funding) with their stakeholders (the public), because they weren’t more upfront about the potential risks. As a scientific organization that has experienced significant (and expensive) failures before, I expect better.
It seems like you want to discredit NASA now ("shouldn't melt") vs some imagined possibility("won't melt" but it does). With the amount of design, analysis, testing, and independent review and verification of the systems, backup systems, triply redundant systems, and autonomy, we can be as sure of it not melting as we can be sure of anything. And we certainly spent a large amount of money on this (about 1/10th of the…
Re: Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?
#115Re: Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, the cool side of the craft will stay cool by radiating its heat away into space.
Is there a limit to the amount of heat a body of space can transmit via black-body radiation? I wonder if the performance of the heat transfer is going to be a useful measurement for science on this mission. I would think so. I just can't help but wonder how much heat an area of space near a star can have added to it. Is it infinite? Is the limit so high that it's far beyond even the atmosphere of a sun? And are ther…
In space, most of the environment is "cold" in that there's not much energy coming from it, so if you show the distant stars a hot radiator, it'll cool off pretty well, because it's all send and no receive. But nearby bodies are different: Earth is approximately room temperature (and in low Earth orbit takes up quite a bit of the sky); the Sun is pretty hot, for a much smaller portion of the sky (depending on your distance.)
If you're not near a planet, and you can reflect away most sunlight, you get pretty cold. See James Webb Space Telescope or anything else with sun shades, including the PSP.
The corona will change this a little, because it's a somewhat denser plasma than usual, but not by much. It'll still be a question of radiator size and heat, which is fairy easy to calculate.
Re: Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't space actually not cold at all -- there's barely any matter there to have a temperature?
Good question. How does heat radiation work in space? Seems the answer is that you don't need matter for heat radiation.
Space is cold, but it doesn't feel cold.
Re: Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?
#118Re: Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?
#119Re: Traveling to the Sun: Why Won’t Parker Solar Probe Melt?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, we can send commands to the spacecraft once it's up there to do thing like modify memory or hard drive contents directly, turn on/off or command payloads and equipment. The full list is pretty exhaustive - anything you could want to be able to do, you can command manually. These things aren't 100% autonomous (though they have autonomous elements in the software). There is also a way to send pre-programmed task l…
Very interesting! Is this kind of command capability (e.g. ability to modify memory contents) something that is usually only available on "non-critical" subsystems, or would you generally expect to also find it on critical components, like the communication or navigation modules?
Ground won't send telecommands to a spacecraft to modify a piece of memory without knowing exactly what they're doing first.