Original subtitles

(sci-Fi music)

- [Man] Set the controls for the heart of the sun.

It's a dramatic statement familiar from movies and music,

but now a new mission really is ready to plunge into the

atmosphere of a star, not just any star,

our star, the sun.

60 years in the making, the Parker Solar Probe is primed to

reveal the true nature of the heart of our solar system,

and the source of the solar winds.

(upbeat music)

(rocket blasting)

(rocket blasting)

(rocket descending)

(Sci-Fi music)

- [Control officer] Ten, nine, eight--

- [Man] Weighing just 685 kilograms, the solar probe was

launched aboard a ULA Delta four heavy rocket.

It's thrust of 9,700 kilo newtons may seem like overkill but

the Parker probe has to travel faster than anything before.

As a matter of fact, it will be the fastest

man made object ever launched.

- [Nicola] Parker's Solar Probe really

is a historic mission.

It was first dreamed of in 1958 and it's remained the

highest priority mission throughout that period.

The reason it hasn't been flown is because it's taken awhile

for technology to catch up with the dreams that

we have for this amazing mission.

(Sci-Fi music)

- [Man] Destined for the sun, our star.

This probe is the realization of a dream that has

been evolving over decades through the talents of

hundreds of dedicated people.

- [Betsy] After working on this for 10 years

it is really a pleasure to see it actually

coming to fruition, to be one small part of this

huge engineering team that is making science dreams

come true is just amazing.

I can't wait to rewrite textbooks and change

the way we look at the sun forever.

I'm really excited to pass this off to the mission

operations team and see all the science data that comes down

and just get to enjoy all the solar probe brings us.

(Sci-Fi music)

- [Nicola] This is a 60 year journey that people have gone

on to make Parker's solar probe a reality.

And to be there at the finish line,

that is definitely the coolest thing about my job.

(Sci-Fi music)

- [Man] Several questions arise:

how did this project get started?

- Who was behind it?

- And why is it called the Parker solar probe?

- It's because of this man.

- [Angela] The Parker solar probe is the first mission ever

to be named after a living person.

Our own university of Chicago astrophysicist Eugene Parker.

(piano instrumental)

- [Man] Born in 1927 in Holton Michigan,

Gene Parker gained his PHD from Cal Tech in 1951.

By 1958 he had developed his theory on the supersonic solar

winds and predicted the shape of the solar magnetic field

in the outer solar system which now bears his name,

the Parker spiral.

- [Angela] So Gene Parker had graduated in Physics and had

a hard time getting a job so he was first doing some

researching at the University of Utah when he was then

invited to come to Chicago.

He was not sure he was going to make it in the field,

when he wrote his paper, it didn't help that the referee's

were not in agreement with him and

didn't want to publish his work.

So he had lots of challenges early on,

but he was right, and this was one of the things that

first helped him be the person that we all recognize as

this amazing role model to all physicists but also the

power of science being right or wrong due to experiments.

So what vindicated him was not just having,

Chandrasekhar for example helped him publish his article,

but what really made him who he is in the history of science

is the fact that the measurement showed him right.

(soft music)

- [Man] Eugene Parker has received many accolades over

his career including the national medal of

science for physical science,

and the title of Chandrasekhar distinguished service

professor and meritus at the University of Chicago.

- [Angela] In 1958 Gene Parker realized that the sun

has a magnetic field and it will have a structure around

the solar system that will be populated

by what we call plasma.

These are hot particles that are flying from the sun

all the way to the edge of the solar system.

This is what he called the solar wind.

The solar wind is a structure generated by the sun which

basically envelops the whole of our solar system all the

way to the edge and it has been studied all the way to the

edge of the solar system with,

for example the voyager probes which have now crossed into

what is outside the solar system which is the furthest that

man has ever been, or man made machines have ever reached

across the solar system.

(soft tempo music)

- [Eugene] I laugh about this because I remember

how upset some people were.

They insisted I made a mathematical error and I would reply,

well here you are, here's five lines of algebra,

you see I made a mistake, show me.

And it's amazing the number of people that just couldn't

let go of the old ideas.

(soft tempo music)

They'd been working on the space craft for several years and

one day the phone rang and it was a guy that I know said

we're talking about putting your name on the solar probe,

plus it was called, and did I object.

I said no I feel rather flattered so he said

okay that's what we'll do.

(indistinct chatter)

- [Man] While the success of this mission bearing his

name will not be known for many years to come,

all the effort is sure to be worthwhile.

(Sci-Fi music)

(upbeat music)

- [Man] The advances in engineering required to make this

mission successful have been far reaching

and at times ingenious.

That's because the speeds required to reach the sun are

mind boggling in themselves.

- [Angela] The solar probe will be reaching the closest

ever to the sun and moving the fastest and reaching the

hottest regions of the solar system.

It's so fast that it could go from Chicago to Beijing

in less than one minute.

- [Betsy] There are many enabling technologies.

The solar rays are very important,

the autonomy was very important.

One of the one's that was also critical was the heat shield

and developing the technology to actually protect

the probe at the sun.

- [Andy] The Parker solar probe is a technological marvel.

The thermal protections system, the heat shield,

will be glowing cherry red.

The front surface of that will be 2500 degrees Fahrenheit

while the space craft remains 85 degrees,

roughly a warm day in Florida.

(Sci-Fi music)

The material sciences just didn't exist in the 60's and 70's

so the carbon which came out of frankly the military,

looking for light wight, stiff, strong structures,

were the precursors to your tennis rackets and golf clubs

which are now the precursor to the carbon technologies

we have on the Parker solar probe.

(Sci-Fi music)

- [Man] Temperatures so close to a star can

reach a phenomenal range.

Serious sun screening is required.

- [Betsy] A sandwich panel is a lot like a honeycomb panel

you'll find in a traditional spacecraft or on airplanes.

You have two outer face sheets, and then you have a core.

In this case the two outer face sheets are carbon

carbon composite which is a lot like the graphite epoxy

might find in your golf clubs, it's just been super heated.

The the inside is a carbon foam.

The Parker solar probe heat shield has a white coating

that's on the sun facing surface of this giant Frisbee

that's protecting the rest of the spacecraft.

That white coating was specially designed here at the lab in

collaboration with red and the space department as well

as the Hawaii school at John Hopkins proper to actually

work at the sun, specifically designed for the solar probe.

The concept is you'd rather be in a white car on a hot day

then a black car on a hot day,

it just knocks down the heat that much more

so it's helping us stay cool at the sun.

(power tools)

That titanium trust was also specially

designed for solar probe.

It's a neat piece, it's a welded titanium trust that's

about four feet tall but it only weighs about 50 pounds.

The key there is we're trying to minimize the conduction

between the heat shield and the space craft.

You want to have as little stuff there as possible.

- [Angela] The hottest environments in the solar system

will be probed by this mission,

and it's instruments that will be measuring all the

different properties of the solar corona are protected by

a shield a state of the art shield developed by NASA which

would make Captain America very envious.

This shield keeps the instruments behind from being cooked

every time the probe gets really close to the sun.

The shield made of reinforced carbon is something that is

very recent technology and only now we can actually get that

close to the sun and verify some of the predictions that

Gene Parker has made over his whole lifetime of trying

to understand the solar wind.

- [Man] Earlier the durations of this spacecraft design were

predicated on a nuclear power supply.

That idea was dropped in favor of solar panels which brought

their own design difficulties so close to the sun.

(upbeat music)

- [Man] Parker solar probe needs electrical energy to

operate like any other satellite, in most other satellites

the spacecraft has solar rays, but unlike other satellites,

we have to generate electricity very close to the sun.

For every watt of electrical energy we generate

we have to dissipate 13 watts of thermal energy.

To do that we need a cooling system and we have a cooling

system that's much like you'd find in your car.

There are two water pumps in the system that pump water

through the solar rays and up into radiators,

those radiators radiate the energy into deep space which is

very cold as opposed to your car where we radiate it to air.

(soft music)

- [Betsy] When we're at closest approach,

the front surface of the heat shield will be at about

2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, the backs over the heat shield

will be about 600 degrees Fahrenheit, but then the space

craft bus is sitting at 85 degrees Fahrenheit.

The shield is actually really keeping everything very cool

and most of the stuff is on the bus.

(soft music)

- [Andy] If you look at the science data there's a big

gap and that gap is where solar probe is going.

We're going to fill that gap of scientific knowledge,

so it's true exploration in that

we're not following somebody.

We're gonna be the first space craft,

the first people to go there, so what will be interesting

is not the answers to the science questions,

what will be interesting is the new questions that

solar probe forces us to ask.

Because one thing we're pretty sure of is we

probably have it somewhat wrong,

the solar probe will teach us what's right.

That'll generate many more questions and

many more missions to come.

(upbeat music)

- [Man] NASA's Parker solar probe will soon fly closer

to the sun than any spacecraft before it,

some four million miles from the visible surface.

But getting that close to the sun requires some fancy

orbital mechanics and a dash of brute force.

Why is it so hard to get to the sun?

- [Andy] Another reason Parker solar probe wasn't launched

in the last 60 years is that getting so

close to the sun is hard.

It takes a huge amount of energy to get to

where we want to go.

When a satellite lifts off the earth it carries the earth's

velocity around the solar system, so the earth is moving at

about 30 kilometers per second around the solar system.

- [Yanping] Of all the space missions I've worked on,

Parker solar probe is the most challenging and a complex

mission to design and to fly.

The launch energy required to reach the sun is 55 times of

the energy required to get to Mars,

and two times the amount to Pluto.

- [Man] Traveling so close to a star can also affect

communications with earth.

In such a dangerous environment engineers had to

design software with serious smarts.

- [Andy] Parker solar probe uses a sophisticated rule based

autonomy system to protect itself.

For long periods of time the spacecraft can communicate

to the earth and it needs to take care of itself.

So the engineers during the development phase spent a lot

of time thinking about what faults could affect Parker

solar probe and came up with solutions for those faults.

Those solutions are encoded in this rule based

autonomy system so that even if there is a fault on orbit,

which of course we hope there isn't,

the system can take care of itself.

(upbeat music)

Another one of the most common questions I get are what if

the spacecraft gets hit by a solar flare,

or gets hit by a Coronal mass ejection will it be destroyed?

- That's a very common question and what I tell people is

the science community will be elated if we were to get hit

by a solar flare or a Coronal mass ejection.

They're very dramatic events when you look at them in a

telescope or during an eclipse,

but in the reality they're very ethereal.

The density, the particles isn't so high to where it can

cause damage to the spacecraft,

but the instruments aboard the spacecraft,

the electromagnetic field instruments,

the high energy particle instruments,

the plasma instruments and the visible white light sensors

will see this event, and how dramatic would that be?

- To see a solar flare coming at you

and fly right through it.

(upbeat music)

- [Man] The sensor suite onboard the Parker solar probe

is indeed impressive.

Each was designed to withstand the harsh radiation and

temperatures to measure the particles electric and

magnetic fields of the solar wind.

There is also an imaging instrument on

the spacecraft called whisper.

- [Russell] The whisper instrument is the only imaging

instrument on the Parker solar probe and it is looking in

the direction that the spacecraft is traveling.

What it see's is light scattered by the dust that's in orbit

about the sun but then once we remove that,

what we see is the light scattered by the electrons in the

Corona in the solar wind.

These measurements that we're making from the whisper

instrument have been made before by other instruments

from one AU from the distance of the earth about 100

million miles from the sun.

By getting closer we're increasing the ability to see what's

really close to the sun.

The fact that your close means you don't have all this

material that's between you and the object that your really

interested in and that contributes to background noise

and you're looking at something that's much more pristine,

you're looking at just that object by itself.

(upbeat music)

- [Stuart] We have three sensors that measure magnetic

fields that are mounted on a boom on the spacecraft

in the shadow shield, then we have five sensors that measure

plasma voltage, these are electric field sensors,

they extend into full sunlight and they get very hot.

There are two ways to measure electric fields in space,

one is using a technique that's called a double probe,

then there's another technique which is measuring

plasma waves or radio waves.

Fields for the first time brings

these two techniques together.

I think the very first data we get will be revolutionary.

That first batch will be a bunch of numbers as a function

of time but the science team will take those numbers

and make visualizations in the form of spectrograms

and eventually that data will be related to models and so

we'll be able to compare directly 3-D visual models of the

Coronal magnetic field.

Two of the key measurements to understanding Coronal heating

are the measurement of the magnetic field and the electric

field ad together they give us what's called the

Poynting Flux which is the energy flux of the Corona.

To make those measurements we have to go into that plasma

and put sensors in the plasma to measure magnetic fields

and electrical fields directly.

These measurements have never been made in the

environment close to the sun.

We've made measurements similar to this in earth's

magnetosphere, earth's ionosphere,

but putting a package like this into the solar Corona

it's just never been done.

The closest anyone's ever been to the sun, and based on what

we've seen so far from spacecraft not quite as close,

it's going to be striking and I think revolutionary.

(upbeat music)

(erruption)

(intense music)

- [Man] The other science packages aborad Parker include

sweep and Isois designed to study the particles emitted

in the solar wind.

- [David] Isois the integrated science investigation of the

sun is an experiment which looks at energetic particles over

a broad range of energies.

From tens of thousands of electron volts

up to 100 million electron volts.

The Isois instrument is based on solid state detectors,

those are detectors that when a particle passes through them

energy is deposited and you can measure that energy and you

can measure that the particle has actually passed through.

So there's the solar wind which is this continuous flow

of lower energy particles, and then there are much more

sporadic and episodic events like solar flares that spew out

great numbers of these much more energetic particles.

In our higher energy instrument we have a whole set of

layers of these detectors and when a particle passes through

those layers it leaves energy in

each and every one of those detectors.

Those detectors are also segmented in pieces like a pie,

and so when a particle comes through from a particular

direction you can tell both the direction the particle came

through at and you can tell the energy

and species of that particle.

- [Justin] The sweep investigation consists of three

separate instruments and a central electronics box.

Most instruments within sweep sit on either side of the

spacecraft and stare out over the entire sky and make

maps of all the different particles,

what energies they're moving at,

what types of particle they are.

The purpose of sweep is to measure the bulk of the solar

wind and the solar atmosphere.

One of the biggest questions we want to resolve with solar

probe is how the Corona and the solar wind are heated.

In order to do that we need to see if there are waves

that are coming from the sun and depositing energy

within the solar atmosphere and the solar wind.

We have a series of sensors across the spacecraft that will

collect individual particles, electrons,

fully ionized hydrogen helium which we call protons

and alpha's and other minor ions,

and make maps of the number of particles,

the function of their speed and energy and type.

We take those maps on the ground and we can interpret them

to figure out the temperature, the density,

the pressure of the solar wind and the solar atmosphere.

(Sci-Fi music)

- [Man] Learning the secrets of our star, the sun,

will help us understand the nature of the solar system

and it's all embracing influence on our world.

(Sci-Fi music)

But the Parker solar probe is not the only mission

destined for that star.

(Sci-Fi music)

(drilling sound)

The European space agency is also in the game.

In collaboration with NASA, the solar orbiter is set

to launch very soon and will be joining Parker in

it's quest for knowledge.

(Sci-Fi music)

The orbiter will fly near the elliptical orbit within

the orbit of Venus but on a much greater inclination off

the Ecliptic giving it access to the pulls of the sun.

(Sci-Fi music)

Unlike the Parker probe, the orbiters main observation

instruments will peer through the solar shield at a safe

distance then reconfigure when making a closer approach.

(Sci-Fi music)

Together they will reveal the secrets of our

closest star the sun.

(upbeat music)

(spacecraft in orbit)