NASA SPACEAPPS CHALLENGE PRESENTATION

SUBMITTED BY: AYESHA MAQSOOD & ALIYA BIBI 

TOPIC: ON THE WAY TO THE SUN

SUBMITTED TO: NASA SPACEAPPS CHALLENGE, KARACHI

SUBMISSION DATE: OCTOBER-02-2022

OBJECTIVE OF OUR CHALLENGE:

• Our objective of this challenge is to tell the audience about Parker Solar Probe: first human-made spacecraft that entered the Sun’s atmosphere.
• This includes all the dangers and struggles that Parker Solar Probe had to face during this mission and how it overcame all of this.
• Our challenge also include a message that what we can learn from the story of Parker Solar Probe.

ABOUT THE SUN: 

The Sun is the only star in our solar system. It is the center of our solar system, and its gravity holds the solar system together. Everything in our solar system revolves around it – the planets, asteroids, comets, and tiny bits of space debris. 

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SOME INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT THE SUN: 

• Our Sun is a 4.5 billion-year-old star – a hot glowing ball of hydrogen and helium at the center of our solar system. 
• The mass of the Sun is 500 times greater than that of all the planets around it. The Sun is about 100 times wider than Earth and about 10 times wider than Jupiter
• The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way, bringing with it the planets, asteroids, comets, and other objects in our solar system.
• Solar wind can cause magnetic storms on Earth.
• Even though auroras are best seen at night, they are caused by the Sun.
• During a total solar eclipse, the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun. This completely blocks out the Sun's light.

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STRUCTURE OF THE SUN: 

• The main regions of the Sun are divided into the regions in the interior of the Sun and the regions of the Sun’s atmosphere. 

 The Sun’s interior consists of three main regions: 

• The core
• The radiation zone
• The convective zone

   The regions of the Sun’s atmosphere consist of: 

• The photosphere
• The chromosphere
• The corona

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SUN’S INTERIOR REGION:

• The core is the hottest part of the Sun.
•  Nuclear reactions take place here, where hydrogen is fused to form helium power the Sun’s heat and light. 
• The temperature at the very core of the Sun is 27 million °F (15 million °C) and the density is about 150 g/cm³.
•  Energy from the core is carried outward by radiation. This radiation bounces around the radiation zone. The radiation that bounces around the radiation zone takes about 170,000 years to get from the core to the top of the convection zone.
• In the convection zone, the temperature drops below 3.5 million °F (2 million °C). Here, large bubbles of hot plasma (a soup of ionized atoms) move upward toward the photosphere, which is the layer we think of as the Sun's surface. 

SUN’S ATMOSPHERIC REGIONS: 

• The Sun doesn’t have a solid surface like Earth and the other rocky planets and moons. 
• The part of the Sun commonly called its surface is the photosphere. 
• The photosphere is the first layer of the solar atmosphere. Above the photosphere are the chromosphere, the transition zone, and the corona. 
• The photosphere, chromosphere, and corona are all part of the Sun’s atmosphere. The Sun’s atmosphere is where we see features such as sunspots, coronal holes, and solar flares. 

FORMATION OF SOLAR WIND: 

• The solar wind is created by the outward expansion of plasma (a collection of charged particles) from the Sun's corona (outermost atmosphere). 
• This plasma is continually heated to the point that the Sun's gravity can't hold it down. 
• It then travels along the Sun's magnetic field lines that extend radially outward. As the Sun rotates (once every 27 days), it winds up its magnetic field lines above its polar regions into a large rotating spiral, creating a constant stream of "wind. 

Solar Wind TRACE UV Image of the Sun's corona

PROTECTION OF EARTH FROM SUN BY MAGNETOSPHERE: 

• A magnetosphere is a region around a planet dominated by the planet's magnetic field.
•  Other planets in our solar system have magnetospheres, but Earth has the strongest one of all the rocky planets.
•  Life on Earth initially developed and continues to be sustained under the protection of this magnetic environment. 
• The magnetosphere shields our home planet from solar and cosmic particle radiation, as well as erosion of the atmosphere by the solar wind - the constant flow of charged particles streaming off the sun. 

PARKER SOLAR PROBE (A SPACECRAFT THAT TOUCHED THE SUN): 

For the first time in history, a spacecraft has touched the Sun. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has now flown through the Sun’s upper atmosphere – the corona – and sampled particles and magnetic fields there. The Parker Solar Probe is a NASA space probe launched in 2018 with the mission of making observations of the outer corona of the Sun. Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 to explore the mysteries of the Sun by traveling closer to it than any spacecraft before. Three years after launch Parker has finally arrived. 

GOAL OF PARKER SOLAR PROBE: 

Since the Parker Solar Probe launched in 2018, it's been orbiting the sun and inching closer with every loop. The probe crossed the Alfven critical surface, which is the boundary between the end of the sun's atmosphere and the start of solar winds, which are streams of charged particles that radiate from the corona and carry a magnetic field. Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)  built and monitor a key instrument on the spacecraft called the Solar Probe Cup, which collects particles from the sun's atmosphere. The Solar Probe Cup's data shows that the Parker Solar Probe dipped into the corona three times on April 28, at one point staying in the outer atmosphere for approximately five hours. To resist the sun's intense temperatures, the device is made of heat-tolerant chemicals like tungsten, niobium, molybdenum, and sapphire. The goal of this entire mission is to learn how the Sun works. 

DISCOVERIES OF PARKER SOLAR PROBE: 

• Parker Solar Probe launched in 2018 to explore the mysteries of the Sun by traveling closer to it than any spacecraft before. �In 2019, Parker discovered that magnetic zig-zag structures in the solar wind, called switchbacks, are plentiful close to the Sun. But how and where they form remained a mystery. 
• Parker discovered that the solar wind is made up of free-floating particles known as plasma. FIELDS instruments surveyed the state of solar wind by measuring how the electric and magnetic fields changed around the spacecraft over the time. 
• Parker Solar Probe senses conditions in the magnetically dominated layer of the solar atmosphere – the corona – that we never could before. 
• Parker Solar Probe has also studied comets, detected radio emissions from Venus' atmosphere, and even captured the first-ever images of Venus' surface in visible wavelengths. With its closest passes of the sun still ahead in 2024 and 2025, only time will tell what new discoveries await. 

WHY WON’T PARKER SOLAR PROBE MELT? 

In space, the temperature can be thousands of degrees without providing significant heat to a given object or feeling hot. Why? Temperature measures how fast particles move, whereas heat measures the total amount of energy they transfer. Since space is mostly empty, there are very few particles that can transfer energy to the spacecraft. The corona through which Parker Solar Probe flies, for example, has an extremely high temperature but very low density. Compared to the visible surface of the Sun, the corona is less dense, so the spacecraft interacts with fewer hot particles and doesn’t receive as much heat. That means that while Parker Solar Probe will be traveling through a space with temperatures of several million degrees, the surface of the heat shield that faces the Sun will only get heated to about 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1,400 degrees Celsius). 

THE SHIELD THAT PROTECTS IT: 

Thousands of degrees Fahrenheit is fantastically hot and to withstand that heat, Parker Solar Probe makes use of a heat shield known as the Thermal Protection System, or TPS, which is 8 feet (2.4 meters) in diameter and 4.5 inches (about 115 mm) thick. Those few inches of protection mean that just on the other side of the shield, the spacecraft body will sit at a comfortable 85 F (30 C). 

DESIGN OF PARKER SOLAR PROBE: 

• The TPS was designed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and was built at Carbon-Carbon Advanced Technologies, using a carbon composite foam sandwiched between two carbon plates. 
• This lightweight insulation will be accompanied by a finishing touch of white ceramic paint on the sun-facing plate, to reflect as much heat as possible.
• Tested to withstand up to 3,000 F (1,650 C), the TPS can handle any heat the Sun can send its way, keeping almost all instrumentation safe. 

STRUGGLES OF PARKER SOLAR PROBE:

• NASA's ambitious Parker Solar Probe spacecraft, studying the Sun at close proximity, is being bombarded with space dust and debris on its way to the Sun.
• Traversing near-sun space at up to 180 kilometers per second, Parker Solar Probe ploughs through the densest region of the zodiacal cloud. The zodiacal cloud is a thick, pancake-shaped dust cloud that extends throughout the solar system and is made up of tiny dust grains shed from asteroids and comets.
• As Parker Solar Probe barrels through this region, the study found that thousands of tiny (about 2 to 20 microns in diameter, or less than a quarter of the width of a human hair) dust grains strike the spacecraft at hypervelocity (faster than 6,700 miles per hour).

STRUGGLES OF PARKER SOLAR PROBE:

• Upon impact, the material that makes up the dust grains and the spacecraft surface is heated so much that it first vaporizes, then ionizes. Ionization is a process where atoms in the vaporized material are separated into their constituent ions and electrons, producing a state of matter called plasma.
• The rapid vaporization and ionization creates a plasma explosion lasting less than one thousandth of a second. The largest of these impacts also generate clouds of debris that slowly expand away from the spacecraft.
• The findings could lead to new insights into space weather around the sun as well as have major implications for the safety of future spacecraft.

PARKER SOLAR PROBE INTERACTION WITH VENUS: 

• NASA’s Parker Solar Probe captured stunning views of visible light images of Venus during its close flyby of the planet in July 2020. 
• The spacecraft whips by Venus a total of seven times over the course of its seven-year mission, using the planet’s gravity to bend the spacecraft’s orbit. These Venus gravity assists allow Parker Solar Probe to fly closer and closer to the Sun on its mission to study the dynamics of the solar wind close to its source. 
• These passes can also yield some unique and even unexpected views of the inner solar system.
•  During the mission’s third Venus gravity assist on July 11, 2020, the onboard Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, or WISPR, captured a striking image of the planet’s night side from 7,693 miles away.  

WISPR is designed to take images of the solar corona and inner heliosphere in visible light, as well as images of the solar wind and its structures as they approach and fly by spacecraft. At Venus, the camera detected a bright rim around the edge of the planet that may be nightglow — light emitted by oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere that recombine into molecules on the night side.  

REFRENCES:

• https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/sun/overview/
• https://universemagazine.com/en/did-you-know-that-12-interesting-facts-about-the-sun/ 
• https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/nmp/st5/SCIENCE/solarwind.html 
• https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nasa-spacecraft-just-touched-the-sun-heres-what-we-learned-180979227/ 
• https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/nasa-enters-the-solar-atmosphere-for-the-first-time-bringing-new-discoveries
• https://hub.jhu.edu/2022/05/31/parker-solar-probe-halfway-finished-mission/
• https://blogs.nasa.gov/parkersolarprobe/2021/11/10/space-dust-presents-opportunities-challenges-as-parker-solar-probe-speeds-back-toward-the-sun/
• https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/parker-solar-probe-offers-a-stunning-view-of-venus
• https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/sun/in-depth/

IMAGES REFERENCES:

• https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Operations/ESA_Ground_Stations/Future_deep-space_missions_drive_ESA_ground_station_evolution
• https://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/gallery/images/cutaway00.html
• https://socratic.org/questions/what-is-the-middle-layer-of-the-sun-s-atmosphere
• https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vector/solar-wind-diagram-vector-21409409
• https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/nasa-enters-the-solar-atmosphere-for-the-first-time-bringing-new-discoveries
• https://phys.org/news/2018-08-parker-solar-probe.html
• https://www.quora.com/Of-what-material-is-the-NASAs-touch-the-probe-satellite-composed-of-to-bear-the-Suns-heat
• https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/sun/parker-solar-probe-captures-its-first-images-of-venus-surface-in-visible-light-confirmed/

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