Original subtitles

The sun at the center of the solar system

is an incredibly hot object.

This hot raging ball of gas.

The atmosphere is so much hotter

than actually the surface and we don't know why.

In order to be able to truly see the sun

the interior, the surface, the atmosphere,

we have to go into space.

We have had spacecraft that have gone in

as far as the planet Mercury.

Mercury is known as the planet of extremes.

It is the planet that formed closest to the sun.

The day side of Mercury plus 450 degrees,

the night side about minus 180.

It's so close to the sun,

the dynamics are so much more powerful.

Mercury is the easiest place to get to

in our solar system where we can measure

the space weather, solar wind

coupling with the planetary magnetic field.

We've identified a coupling object.

If it turns out that calculation's wrong

the mission doesn't succeed.

It transpired a new discovery had been made.

We have found what we believe is ice at Mercury.

We're gonna go to the most extreme environment

in our entire solar system.

We're gonna go in and we're gonna touch the sun.

Three, two, one, zero.

(dramatic music)

This is the story

of the exploration of the sun

told by those who dared to do it.

The latest step in our quest to uncover

the secrets of the sun and the mysteries of Mercury.

That's goodbye, spacecraft.

(dramatic music)

Humanity, I think, has a general quest

for knowledge.

We tend to just ask questions and wonder why.

The nature is to look up and to look around you

and to want to understand your surroundings.

And so the first thing anyone looked up

and wandered about was the sun.

Studying the sun has always been difficult,

mainly because it's so bright.

It burns out your eyes, it burns out photographic plates,

it burns out everything if you don't do it carefully.

It think it's been over the years,

seen as at sometimes friend and at other times as foe.

Described in literature and in art

as being a fiery warlord of the solar system.

Giver of life but then during solar eclipses,

all the civilizations were fearful

that the sun wouldn't come back

because they relied on it so much.

The sun is a constant in our lives.

It rises every morning, it sets every night

and yet when you look at the sun

you will see that it is anything but constant,

it is a continually changing, incredibly active star.

Chinese astronomers were among the first

to record the sun's behavior some 2,800 years ago.

They noted that dark patches sometimes appeared

on it's surface and then disappeared.

But it would take the invention of the telescope

for humans to truly to begin

to unravel the mysteries of our star.

In the summer of 1610, amazingly and somewhat foolishly

we would say today, Thomas Harriet

looked through a telescope directly at the sun.

So he did this in the early morning

when there was mist on the horizon,

so the sun's light was diminished

but he looked at the sun directly

and saw on the surface black spots.

The record that he left for us was a drawing of the sun

with spots on the surface.

But then the most famous observer of sunspots is Galileo

and he made absolutely fantastic intricate drawings

of sunspots and he monitored, in particular

over the summer of 1612

allowing us to see where the sunspots were forming,

he was able to show that the sun rotated.

He was able to show that the sun rotated

at different rates depending on the latitude of the sun

and he really showed us

that yes the sun is not this perfect object,

it is blemished, but it is interesting and it's changing.

Galileo thought that the sunspots

were most likely clouds forming in the sun's atmosphere.

Then 200 years later an entirely different set

of observations began to hint

that the earth and the sun might have some kind

of mysterious invisible connection.

(dramatic music)

In 1806, a Prussian explorer and geographer

called Alexander Humboldt.

He noticed that during a night

where there was a strong display of the aurora

his compass needle veered away from it's normal bearing.

Then when the aurora display subsided,

the compass went back to it's previous position.

In fact from May of that year until June 1807

he took compass readings every half an hour

from midnight till morning.

And in his work he discovered a phenomenon

that he called a magnetic storm.

Today we call it a geomagnetic storm,

a disturbance of the earth's magnetic field.

Humboldt concluded that whatever was behind the aurora

the northern and southern lights

was a having a magnetic impact on the earth.

As investigations into the mysteries

of the sun continued more

and more strange phenomena was seen.

In 1859, Richard Carrington, a wealthy brewer

in Surry, in England, his passion was

to watch the sun everyday and draw what he saw

on the surface.

And he noticed one day in early September

when he was drawing his sunspots,

that he saw these two bright regions form,

they sort of flared into brightness.

And he was so shocked he rushed off

to find somebody to come and collaborate

what he'd seen, amazing new discovery,

no one had ever seen that before,

he wanted a second opinion.

But by the time he got back,

the white flaring spots had diminished in brightness

and they'd moved.

At the same time, in London's Sky Garden Observatory,

an extremely sensitive device called a magnetometer

that monitors the earth's magnetic field

registered a sudden anomaly.

Then 17 and a half hours later, the aurora break out.

Across the United States and England

and various other places,

in India where they had telegraph systems,

they all stopped working.

They generated hundreds of volts of electricity

on these lines.

There was a person in Washington

that was nearly electrocuted.

Apparently another telegraph station was burned down

in Connecticut.

The Aurora Borealis which normally

hides up in the arctic regions

could now be seen in Cuba almost directly overhead.

In Japan they were reporting deep crimson red aurora.

Miners up in Pike's Peak in Colorado

basically broke camp at one in the morning

thinking that it was daylight,

you know they were fixing breakfast. (laughs)

'Cause it was so light.

So when Richard Carrington saw something on the sun

and people directly saw and temporarily correlated

the same time an event of the earth,

they started to think,

yeah there is something going on here.

(slow music)

Carrington described his observations

of solar flares at the Royal Astronomical Society

in London that November.

It was the first time an event on the sun's surface

had been directly linked to events on the earth

but the cause of this strange connection

remained a mystery until the invention of new technologies.

The real revolution for astronomy didn't really happen

until the advent of photography,

beginning with the daguerroeotype method.

(dramatic music)

And that was adapted for telescopic use

(dramatic music)

and finally the first photograph of the sun was taken.

Georgia Ellery Hale in the late 1890's

was the first to develop an instrument

called the spectroheliograph,

where basically he selected a spectral line,

I think it was H-alpha the atomic hydrogen line

and he scanned that line on a photographic plate

to build up an image of the sun

seen only in the light of that particular transition

of that atom.

And so all of a sudden that reduced the brightness

of the sun by a million times

and now you can just image the sun

and see this glowing ring of light.

(dramatic music)

Using this technique,

Hale established that there was strong magnetic fields

in sunspots on the sun's surface.

Other technology was used to unravel the sun's secrets,

it resulted in an even more puzzling discovery.

That hazy atmosphere that you see

during a total solar eclipse,

the sun's corona is hotter than the surface of the sun.

And that really doesn't make sense,

it breaks the laws of physics.

You move away from a hot body, it should get colder

but something is happening in this region

that really heats this material up to incredible heat.

And we don't know why if it's that hot

why does the gas stay on the sun?

Hot materials move really fast

and if the gas molecules are traveling faster

than escape velocity, there should be a wind

streaming away from the sun.

And this radical idea was predicted

by an American astronomer Eugene Parker.

In 1958, space was thought to be a hard vacuum

and while the light and heat from the sun

could pass through space, the enormous gravity of the sun

would prevent any matter such as gas from reaching us.

But Parker thought differently.

In the 1950's, people thought that space was empty

and it's vacuums void, there's nothing in it whatsoever.

The idea was contradicted by several observations.

He went through the mathematics,

he went through the physics and he predicted

the hot atmosphere of the sun

has high pressure so the gas is wanting to push outwards,

meanwhile the gravitational pull of the sun

is trying to hold the gas in

so you have this competition of forces.

And if you go up in height in the atmosphere of the sun

you get to a point where the gravitational pull

is not able to overcome the outward push of the hot gas.

And there's a really important consequence of that.

The gas streams out into the solar system,

the sun is literally expanding into space.

I realized that we had the supersonic expansion

of the outer atmosphere of the sun.

A completely radical idea.

Eugene wrote up a scientific paper,

submitted it to the Astrophysical Journal

and it got rejected.

Hardly anybody took it seriously.

I received several polite and not so polite declinations.

What Eugene Parker realized was that the sun is so hot

that the atoms are moving so quickly

that some of them can actually escape from the sun

and his calculations suggested the sun should be constantly

losing gas, streaming away to make a wind.

It was too revolutionary to think

that the previous view of a sun held together by gravity

in it's entirety was not actually true.

Parker asked the then editor

of the Astrophysical Journal, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

to look at his paper again.

Chandrasekhar couldn't find any mathematical flaws

in Parker's work.

Chandra studied stars for many years,

in fact he goes on to win a Nobel prize

looking at the lifetimes of stars.

He looks at the math, he looks at the physics.

The editor said to Eugene, so do you really think

there's something in the work you've done?

And he said yes and the editor published it.

But still it's ridiculed.

Just because the paper was published

it had no positive effect, they were not behind it

because they just believed it was wrong.

Three, two, one, zero.

(rocket blasting)

Four years after I made the proposal,

there was a spacecraft going to Venus.

When Mariner Two flew by Venus in December 1962,

it became the first successful mission to an other planet.

During the journey it made another first,

it measured the density and composition

of a constant stream of particles racing out from the sun.

And they did indeed discover that the sun

does have this outflow of gas coming from it.

The solar wind does exist.

The rest is history.

(dramatic music)

This discovery was momentous, all of a sudden space

is no longer a void, it's no longer a vacuum,

it's filled with material, it's filled with this wind

from the sun.

The speed of the solar winds, it's almost beyond belief.

It's moving between 250 and 750 kilometers per second

and it has some real significant effects on our planet.

The earth sort of protects itself

from the large dynamic forces of solar wind

through this fairly stiff magnetic field that it has.

In the direction of the sun,

the magnetic field gets compressed and strengthened.

On the midnight part of the earth directly opposite

the magnetic field gets stretched out

into a comet like tail.

That tail actually can snap and reconnect itself identically

and that causes a flow of particles into the polar regions

of the earth and that's why we have the aurora.

(dramatic music)

So the first time I really understood

that the sun was having a big impact on our planet

was when I first saw the northern lights

and I was out in Sweden in Kurina

in the freezing cold winter and I looked up

and just saw this incredible curtain of green and red light

and it literally looked like sort of cinema curtains

billowing in the wind.

When I actually stood on the ground looking up

and watching the aurora, I was like, wow, (laughs)

this is amazing.

And the sudden thought of everything I'm looking at

is being driven by what has come from the sun

through the solar wind and is impacting

with our planet's magnetic field.

(dramatic music)

Orbiting solar observatories

carry a number of complex experiments,

advised by scientists in NASA.

The Orbiting Solar Observatory

were eight missions in a series.

They were launched from the early 1960's

towards the end of the 1970's.

Collectively these missions gave

a longer term opportunity to study the activity of the sun.

There was an instrument on board that allows

you to view the sun using an artificial solar eclipse.

So place a disc in front of the sun

block out it's dazzling light

and monitor the extended atmosphere around the sun.

(dramatic music)

In 1971, some sort of smudges were noticed in these images.

It transpired that a new discovery had been made.

Today we call them coronal mass ejections.

Huge amounts of gas and by huge up to

about two million tons of gas

ejected in filament that moves very rapidly

away from the sun.

These are like bowling balls of gas

being thrown away from the sun towards the planets.

13, 12, 11, 10--

Skylab made some of the first detailed

observations of the coronal massive ejection events.

Four, three, two, one, zero.

The Skylab mission was a human space flight mission.

It was an orbiting laboratory.

All the astronauts had been trained in solar physics

before they launched

and they were operating solar telescopes

that were on board this fantastic space station.

(dramatic music)

One of the real successes of Skylab

comes from the number of coronal mass ejections

that the mission observed.

Long term observations really showed

just how active the sun is

and we can see that these eruptions

are basically the massive amount being ejected

into the solar system at speeds

of millions of miles an hour,

maybe even up to 3,000 kilometers a second.

They are phenomenally energetic events.

(dramatic music)

Whenever I see the images from Skylab,

I'm always in awe because it strikes me

just how beautiful the sun is,

how much structure the atmosphere has

but also how dynamic the sun is.

There are images of eruptions that are absolutely vast.

And I always have in mind how dwarfed we are by the sun.

The power of the sun and the complexity of the sun

and the beautiful structures of the sun

are all encapsulated in those images.

(dramatic music)

That allowed us to understand the events of 1859,

the so-called Carrington event

because we realize that the sun can reach out to us

in a different way.

The discovery of this huge mystery

of all this charged material on earth,

it is coronal mass ejection

and that what happened in 1859, the Carrington event.

And there have been a number of near Carrington events.

In 2012, there was a Carrington level coronal mass ejection

event that just missed the earth.

As we move to a society that's more and more dependent

upon technology we become more vulnerable to space weather.

(dramatic music)

With space weather it's extremely theoretical

until your city goes into a blackout

for a couple of weeks at a time.

That hasn't happened yet

but if we have a Carrington level super storm

that event is likely to be very, very real

and quite deadly as well.

A Carrington level event has been predicted now

to cause trillions of dollars worth of damage,

could wipe out power grids.

It can cause GPS malfunctions, satellite instrumentation

to be damaged, satellites to change their altitude,

it can cause high doses of radiation

to any astronauts out there

but we never see that big event

because they very rarely happen.

So the reason I want to study Mercury

is because Mercury sees that Carrington size event everyday.

(dramatic music)

It's so close to the sun, the dynamics are so much

more powerful, I can study the physics

behind the interaction

and if I can understand that physics of Mercury

I can apply that knowledge to the earth.

Mercury is known as the planet of extremes.

It is the planet that formed closest to the sun.

One of the things that we do in planetary science

is fly by and the fly by enables us

to do initial reconnaissance to determine

if we wanna come back.

For Mercury, it's first fly by Mariner 10

really was exciting.

Mariner was launched in 1973.

The journey there is very complex.

You have this issue of not being sucked into the sun

so what we do is lapse of the solar system

until our spacecraft and Mercury are in the same orbit

and then we use a little bit of power at the last minute

to be captured by Mercury's gravity

and it took three fly bys of Mercury.

We didn't really know what we might find.

(dramatic music)

And they produced a lot of surprises.

They encountered strong magnetic fields.

It surprised us, Mercury has a magnetic field,

wow who would have thought

then they saw the magnetic field looked like a magnetic tail

just like they see at earth.

Because they were fly bys and they took images

of the surface spanning around 44%

they gave us a snapshot in time

but we've got no idea about the global picture

of Mercury and so we couldn't really get a good idea

about that until we sent the next mission of the orbiter.

Mariner 10 comes back and says oh, we're seeing things

here that contradict our previous understanding.

Then when resources are available and conditions

are favorable, they go back

and they do a mission of exploration

and that's what Messenger was.

Six, five, four, three, main engine start,

two, one and zero and lift off of Messenger

on NASA's mission to Mercury.

When I became the head of planetary science,

Messenger had launched and it was on it's way to Mercury.

Messenger was all about exploring the full surface

that we've never seen before

but also we had to really think about how

we develop our technology to survive this environment.

It's much more extreme than other planets

in our solar system.

I think one of the main concerns with us with an orbiter

is we go from one side to the other

in a very short time period, a few tens of minutes,

the day side of Mercury plus 450 degrees,

the night side about -118.

So the extreme in temperatures over 600 degrees

swing between one side and the other.

So the gradient in temperature is huge

and trying to build an instrument

that takes precise scientific measurements

is a huge challenge, a huge engineering challenge.

Messenger orbited Mercury every 12 hours.

In the four years from 2011 to 2015,

it took more than 200,000 images of it's surface.

What Messenger did was it provided

as it's top science priority,

a high resolution image of the entire surface of Mercury.

But the mystery was that there were bright spots,

there were small bright spots

and in order for the radar

to produce a bright high intensity reflection

there were thought to be two possibilities.

First possibility is that you have

a highly electrically conducting material.

The other possibility is you might

have a natural geologic formations.

But it was very hard to imagine,

nobody's ever seen any kind of geology that would do that.

And then one of the Messenger scientists

took all of the bright spots

in the ground based radar measurements

and laid them down on the map of Mercury.

Every single bright spot that was detected from the earth

was inside of a crater that is permanently shadowed.

We have found what we believe is ice,

water ice at Mercury which is really close to the sun.

It's in one of the hottest regions in our solar system.

So how did the ice get in there?

Has it been through meteor strikes

'cause meteors have water?

Has it been through comets hitting the body,

comets have a lot of water.

It's really an enigma.

It used to be thought that earth is the cradle for life,

therefore all organic chemistry in the solar system

is probably concentrated in the band

that the earth's orbit maps out around the sun.

But we're not studying the water cycle

literally throughout the solar system.

At one extreme, again planet of extremes,

you have mercury, where despite the huge temperatures,

you actually do have some water trapping

and the rest of the solar system

we're seeing huge reservoirs of water

tied up in the ice planets, the moons.

So when you're talking about where life is

and where the kind of chemistry and ultimately biology

that might produce something like us could take place,

at the moment, it's looking like it might be broader

than just one little planet at the Goldilocks distance.

We knew that Messenger was not going to go on forever.

We had our nominal mission lifetime in a single year

and our spacecraft survived incredibly well,

survived four and a half years

but there had to be a point

where the mission came to an end.

Let's end it by impacting the planet.

Now why would we do that?

And that's because European Space Agency

has a mission called BepiColumbo

that's going to Mercury next

and it's gonna answer some of the questions

that Messenger left behind.

And one of the things that we wanna know about

is when we open the surface up, from an impact,

from a new impact, what are we gonna find?

Now we really have an excellent idea

as to where we crashed it,

'cause we did approve doing that.

I signed off on it or it wouldn't have happened

(laughs) and we crashed it, left a big hole

and so we really are gonna be able to tell BepiColumbo

where to look for it.

And I think some new science will come out of that,

that's the hope.

(dramatic music)

One of the things that Mercury tells us

and Messenger did is by looking carefully at it's orbit

and how it's changing,

the sun must be losing mass.

We know by studying other stars

that the sun's evolution will lead it

into a phase called red giant

where the surface will balloon out to perhaps

further than the orbit of earth

and when that happens all life on this planet

will be extinguished.

Now when is that?

By really looking at the evolution based

on our observations of Mercury,

we can really find tune those answers

and determine how the sun is evolving over time.

This is really spectacular when you think about it.

Understanding our star by looking at individual planets.

The Soho mission launched in 1995.

10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three,

two, one, ignition and lift off of Soho in the atmosphere

on a international mission of solar physics.

It was a really significant mission

because it carried a whole suite of telescopes

that enabled us to probe the sun inside and out.

It made the closest observations yet of the surface

of the sun that really showed how the sun is sculpted

by magnetic fields.

One of the big, exciting outcomes of the Soho mission

has been the development in our understanding

of how corona mass ejections work.

Soho over the years has literally observed thousands

of them because we had this continuous view of the sun.

And we understood that they are eruptions

of magnetic field that carry mass into the solar system.

So Soho has really enabled us to sort of work more

on that sun-earth connection through these eruptions

that can come our way.

The other big discovery that Soho helped us make

was the understanding about the internal mechanisms

inside the sun.

It sounds really counter-intuitive to say

that we can look inside the sun

because we know when we look at images,

we can see through the atmosphere down into the surface

but we can't directly see inside.

So when we say see inside the sun,

we're actually referring to a technique

in which we use sound waves to see, to probe inside the sun.

So the sun is this huge ball of gas

and it has sound waves that bounce around on the inside.

And when those sound waves come to the surface,

they make the surface breathe,

we're able to decipher the sounds

and from that we're able to decipher

what the conditions are like inside the sun.

One of the most remarkable things about Soho

is it's one of the toughest little spacecrafts

in NASA's fleet.

It's still there today and the mission has been extended

until around 2022 and we should all be thankful

because Soho is our guardian,

it monitors the sun, it's our early warning system

of coronal mass ejections of geomagnetic storms.

We have ignition and we have lift off

of NASA's Genesis spacecraft

on a mission to retrieve a piece of the sun.

Genesis launched in 2001.

It's aim is to measure the composition of the solar wind,

so the composition of the sun

and the different layers of the sun.

Now previous missions have done this from a distance

but Genesis is actually gonna collect some of the sun

that's come to it and bring it back to earth

because on earth in a laboratory

we can measure compositions extremely accurately.

(dramatic music)

The composition of the sun is really important to understand

because the mass of the sun compared to the planets

is absolutely huge and if we know the composition of the sun

we know the composition of the solar system as a whole.

The spacecraft has located a very special point

where the sun's gravity balances the earth's gravity

and there it sat for 850 days

collecting the solar wind,

collecting these charged particles from the sun

and then collectors were closed

and it flies back to earth to land in a desert in Oregon.

Have a good visual on the target.

Genesis probe has fallen through the atmosphere

and it gets to 33 kilometers above the ground

and this is when the drope parachute is supposed to deploy

and it doesn't.

There is nothing to slow this spacecraft down.

And on mission Maidrin CCP advise

from our vantage point we do not see a drope chute,

negative drope.

345, it looks like we have no chute sir,

sector 200-- Mission manager.

Look for an impact.

(dramatic music) (crashing)

(helicopter engines)

And we have a bit visual on the impacted vehicle

on the surface.

The parachutes failed to deploy,

the probe split into two and that horrible desert mud

enters the spacecraft, the thing is shattered.

The disappointment around the scientific community is huge.

The information that we have here

from people on the ground is that nothing deployed

and therefore they're treating it as a live spacecraft.

After this dreadful failure they go to the desert

and they pick out little tiny pieces of glass

and were picking out little bits of the collectors

and they actually managed to clean the collectors

and perform these really detailed analysis.

And actually the mission achieved all of it's objectives.

It measured the composition of the sun,

it measured the composition of the solar wind,

it measured the composition of these mass ejections

and it measured the isotopic composition of the sun.

And it was incredible, it did everything we wanted it

to do but it just did it in pieces.

Study of the sun is incredibly important.

We rely on it for light and heat

and we are so dependent on our star for our survival

we really need to understand.

The solar probe is the next big challenge,

it's the next ambitious mission that we've ever done.

Because we're gonna go to the most extreme environment

in our entire solar system.

We're gonna go in and we're gonna touch the sun.

There are still so many things to understand about the sun.

There are some huge mysteries.

We already knew that the corona's a million degrees

but how come?

The solar probe is gonna get closer to the sun

than any spacecraft ever has.

It's gonna be within 10 radii

that's within the outer parts

of the atmosphere of the sun.

It's touching our star.

It really is because we have worked so hard

over the 60 years since Gene first wrote his paper

to really hone the technology that's needed

to do this kind of mission.

It really is an incredibly ambitious mission.

So I actually did have the pleasure of taking Gene

into the clean room at the John Hopkins applied physics lab

where we did most of the assembly and a lot of the testing.

And it was a really nice moment of taking him in

and seeing his reaction to this incredible piece

of technology that was going to go and do this mission

that he'd really kind of fathered.

And so he got very emotional in the clean room

and watching some of the engineering team

that was in there that I introduced him to

and it was like they were meeting a rockstar.

And they were very excited to be meeting him,

he was very excited to be meeting them

and so it was a lovely moment to just say,

this is your spacecraft and she's going

into the solar wind and into the corona

and hearing the instruments

that are gonna make the measurements.

Everybody seems to be in good spirits.

I think everybody loves working on this mission so,

look at the happy smiles all around.

And so having that time with him

and again watching him get just he was mind blown

at the technology he was looking at

and the first thing he did was immediately

give credit to all of the engineers

for their work on that spacecraft

and he even said to me, really Nicky, I just wrote a paper.

And I said, yeah, it's a pretty good paper, though Gene.

And he said yeah, if it turns out that I'm wrong

in what I've predicted I can just write another paper.

He said but if one of your engineers

has got any of their calculations wrong,

the mission doesn't succeed.

And so he said the pressure on you guys

is just intense and seeing the way you've risen up

to every challenge, he said is just amazing.

And that I think his favorite phrase

was I take my hat off to the men and women

of the solarprobe team.

Nice to meet you and good luck with everything.

Thank you so much. Thanks again.

It's by far the most ambitious solar physics mission

we've ever had and in fact it has a really fitting name.

I was sitting in my office one day,

the phone rang, I picked it up,

it was Tom Serbokin and he said NASA is contemplating

putting your name on a solar probe,

did I have any objection

and I was sort of astonished

and I guess I sort of mumbled back well yeah, I guess so.

I was sitting there in my office thinking

my god, what have we gotten into now?

The Parker Solar Probe named after the person

who predicted the existence of the solar wind.

The first time we ever named a mission

after a living scientist and absolutely appropriate

that it has this name.

(dramatic music)

That discovery of the solar wind,

he was so visionary, he made this amazing discovery.

He started a whole new branch of science,

the physics of our sun.

(dramatic music)

I had not been present at a launch

but of course we've all seen it on TV.

We were invited to a location which had a clear view

of the launch but over six miles away.

It's three o'clock in the morning.

Eight, seven, six, five, four,

three, two, one (screaming)

lift off of the mighty Delta 4 heavy rocket

with NASA's Parker Solar Probe,

a daring mission to shed light on the mysteries

of our closest star, the sun.

Wow, go baby go!

The sky lights up and very slowly

this luminous bubble rises up and booms off,

you realize that it's never coming back. (laughs)

(applause and cheers)

What a way to start. Yeah.

Here it comes.

That's goodbye spacecraft, so long fellows.

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Nothing on Parker Solar Probe was easy.

Everything was challenging,

you're going into this extreme temperature,

you've got a lot of solar pressure,

you've got a huge amount of heat coming just from the light

on the sun because you're so close to it.

We used Venus to do our gravity assist.

It's a little bit like a hambraic turn,

it's counterintuitive because we don't use the planet

to increase our speed as a lot of missions do.

We actually use it to slow down a little bit,

we give energy to Venus but very generous.

So it slows down and turns the craft in a little more

towards the sun and so that helps us

sort of trim our orbits.

And we do 24 of them very close to the sun on one side

out around the planet Venus on the other

and then do that trim maneuver just to keep making

that orbit smaller and smaller

so she will actually get closer and closer to the sun

with each one of those orbits.

So the idea of designing that mission,

getting all those trajectories in place,

getting all those maneuvers,

knowing exactly when to fire the thruster,

that's an incredibly challenging thing to do.

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She has to be incredibly independent.

She has to look after herself

because it takes light eight minutes to travel

from the sun to the earth,

we don't have time to joystick the mission

if she's in trouble, she needs to take corrective action.

The programming of the corrective action,

everything is challenging lightweight materials

so that you can stand up to these incredible heat.

Everything was a big challenge with this mission.

(dramatic music)

Parker Solar Probe today has completed two of the flybys

through the sun's corona.

We're in a very good location where the earth

can see the spacecraft and actually down link

all of our data so we just started seeing

some of the incredible images

and some of the secrets that have been unlocked

in these data sets.

So we're scientists, we get excited about wiggly line plots

and we've seen some of the plots

and I've actually heard scientists kind of gasp

because it's just not quite what you thought

or it doesn't fit any of the simple models.

There are so much in there and it's going to take

a long time to kind of unravel all the mysteries

that are in these data sets.

Right now we're in a region where we can do corotation

so that means that the spacecraft

is sitting above the same part of the sun

and as the spacecraft is moving,

the sun is rotating and we're actually getting some time

where it was sitting over the same part of the sun

for a long time.

And so we're excited about all of the different types

of science, the different ways

that we can operate the spacecraft

and the again, teasing out the science

that is really appropriate for wherever we are in the orbit.

It tends to be visionaries like Parker

who are responsible for some of the greatest leap forwards

in science.

It's people who can really see the simple parts

of the problem, the things that really matter.

I think that the whole Parker Solar Probe science team

feels a tremendous responsibility to answer these questions

that have been around for decades

but I also think that missions really do inspire

the next generation of scientists.

If you look at a NASA mission it has such an incredible

diverse group of people that have a common goal

and so I don't think you necessarily need to aspire

to be a rocket scientist or a propulsion engineer,

you can be anything you want

and really work on a NASA mission.

They make us explore these tremendous concepts

that ultimately are gonna be our future.

They will provide the future science

that allows humanity to survive and thrive.

(dramatic music)