Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Solar probe is a mission where, for the first time,
we're going to send a spacecraft
into the upper atmosphere of the sun.
We, for decades, have wondered what makes the sun so hot.
We can see that the disk of the sun is 6000 degrees
in temperature but we can also see that the corona,
the atmosphere around the sun, is a million degrees.
How does that happen?
How does it get so hot?
We want to go in here and look at the electric
and magnetic fields that happen as part
of the acceleration region that give rise to the solar wind
and give rise to this hot corona that we see,
but we don't understand.
We want to go to this acceleration region;
we want to measure these electric magnetic fields
and we're going to measure these things
with this little gold box.
It's sort of a souped-up car radio
that measures these radio waves in space.
We build a device like this to capture these signals to try
to help us understand what gives rise to the solar wind
and to the hot corona.
And we'll put it in on the spacecraft
and launch it in to space.
One of the things that we're interested
in is what we call space weather.
We, here in Minnesota, know about space weather
for a number of reasons.
One is, many of us have been lucky enough
to see the Northern Lights.
The Northern Lights are one
of the beautiful aspects of space weather.
They are driven by the energy in the solar wind interacting
with our Earth's magnetic field,
but there are also very devastating aspects
of space weather.
One is that the same phenomena
that create the beautiful Northern Lights can make strong
currents that can destroy power systems,
or they can make very energetic particles
that can destroy our communication satellites.
And so we're very interested in being able
to predict what's going to happen in the solar wind
and these coronal mass ejections that Keith talked about
and how they interact with our Earth's magnetic field.
We've gotten undergrad students involved in looking at the data
from some of Keith's early instruments,
doing research papers on it, and I anticipate
that we'll have lots of students who will have a chance
to study these processes with the data
from our solar probe instrument over the next 20 years.