10-20-2019, 02:20 PM
The European spacecraft that aims to take the closest ever pictures of the Sun is built and ready for launch.
The European probe called "SoIO" is a space craft that is designed to collect data from the sun closer than we have ever been able to before. This probe is going to be put in orbit around the planet mercury and will fly 43 million km away from the sun. This means that it is going to have to deal with temperatures up to 600 degrees Celsius. This project began in the late 1990s and finally got a contract in 2012. The probe is said to launch around September 2020. I think that this mission is really important and should give us a lot of important data regarding our sun. From earth's point of view, the sun is so far away that it is really hard to get a good image of what is really going on. This data can help provide us information about future solar flares and as we discussed in class, a geomagnetic reversal might be immanent in the near future which can put us at a higher risk of being affected by these flares. This isn't a problem we should be stressing about but its nice to know that in the event in the future when the earths magnetic poles flip and we are increasingly vulnerable to solar flares, the data collected from this probe could help provide us important information that we previously did not know as well as really cool pictures of the sun.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-50040893
The European probe called "SoIO" is a space craft that is designed to collect data from the sun closer than we have ever been able to before. This probe is going to be put in orbit around the planet mercury and will fly 43 million km away from the sun. This means that it is going to have to deal with temperatures up to 600 degrees Celsius. This project began in the late 1990s and finally got a contract in 2012. The probe is said to launch around September 2020. I think that this mission is really important and should give us a lot of important data regarding our sun. From earth's point of view, the sun is so far away that it is really hard to get a good image of what is really going on. This data can help provide us information about future solar flares and as we discussed in class, a geomagnetic reversal might be immanent in the near future which can put us at a higher risk of being affected by these flares. This isn't a problem we should be stressing about but its nice to know that in the event in the future when the earths magnetic poles flip and we are increasingly vulnerable to solar flares, the data collected from this probe could help provide us important information that we previously did not know as well as really cool pictures of the sun.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-50040893