Today, Explained - NASA shoots a billion dollars at the sun

Episode Date: August 13, 2018

You might have missed it this weekend, but NASA shot a spaceship at the sun. Once it gets there, the Parker Solar Probe might find the secret to keeping our big hot star from destroying us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Johnny Harris, you're a reporter here at Vox. You did the Border series with the videos. The second last time we spoke, while I was in Hong Kong and then came back and had this kind of redeeming moment where I was like, hey, I need to share the wealth here. And so I ordered toothbrushes for my whole family and it's been pretty big impact on my family culture. I want to hear all about it. Okay. Okay. Minus 15.

Profe ignition. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. Liftoff of the mighty Delta IV heavy rocket with NASA's Parker Solar Probe, a daring mission to shed light on the mysteries of our closest star, the sun. Response looks good. Brian Resnick, you report on science here at Vox. Something happened yesterday that has the potential to fundamentally alter our understanding of the universe. True? True. What happened?

We launched a spaceship to the sun. Amazing. Yeah, it was really cool. This spaceship is going to come within 4 million miles of the solar surface, closer than any human-made object has come to the sun. And by that, it's the closest human-made object to come to a star. Ever. Ever. In the history of human.

Yeah, we've never launched something to graze a star. This is NASA we're talking about. Yeah, NASA. This is the Parker Solar Probe. 4 million miles of the sun still sounds really far away, but comparatively, how close is that? It's going through an area of the sun called the corona, which is the solar atmosphere. And that extends about five million miles outside of the surface of the sun. Wow.

And the thing about the corona is it's actually hotter than the surface of the sun. So the area outside the sun, all of this atmosphere around the sun, is hotter than the surface of the sun. So the area outside the sun, all this atmosphere around the sun, is hotter than the sun itself. Yeah, it's actually kind of crazy if you think about it. So think about a campfire or something like that. If you stand real close to the source of the flames, it's really hot. Yeah. And you'd step back, and then it gets cooler and cooler.

The sun doesn't work like that. The further you step back from the sun, the hotter it gets. That's bananas. It is bananas. It's something like the surface is 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is very hot. Sounds hot. Yeah, you wouldn't enjoy it. Definitely hotter than like DC this summer.

Definitely hotter than DC, although maybe not as humid. But then the atmosphere of the sun is something like 2 million degrees or even hotter. So it's just so many orders of magnitude hotter. It's called the coronal heating problem. It's a problem. It's a problem. It's one of these mysteries in science that have vexed physicists for decades. One of the most vexing problems in astrophysics.

One of the biggest mysteries in astronomy. This has been a mystery for quite a while. And sending the solar probe there is going to help maybe understand why it works that way. Yeah, we want to understand this coronal heating problem. So how do we do this? How do we launch something at the sun? Because obviously it could melt. So there's a lot of cool things about getting to the sun.

I should say, it's not cool. It's hot. Not cool at all. It's not cool at all. There are a lot of hot things about getting to the sun. First off, the solar corona reaches around 2 million degrees, and you might be thinking, like, isn't this thing going to melt? Yeah. The reality is, is actually the spacecraft itself won't get that hot. It's kind of like, you know, you can imagine putting your hand into a 200 degree oven, but

if you put your hand into a pot of boiling water, it was scald immediately. The difference there is like the heat in the pot of boiling water is more densely packed together. It transfers to your skin much more quickly than the heat in the oven. So you can think of this region around space, like the heat in your oven. There's a lot of extremely, extremely hot energetic particles, plasma out there, but it's spaced far enough apart that this spacecraft is only going to be subjected

to temperatures like around 2500 degrees Fahrenheit. And that's still a lot. That's like the temperature of magma. It can melt rocks. So this Parker Space Probe is the fastest thing that mankind has ever made. Yeah, it will be.

By the time it gets to its closest approach to the sun, it will be traveling around 430,000 miles per hour. And so when is it going to get there? Like, in a couple weeks? What? Seven years. Seven years? Seven years. We'll have a Space Force by then. Yeah, we'll be drafted into

Space Force and we'll see it up close ourselves. Why is it going to take seven years? Because it's actually really hard to get to the sun. You can't just go straight there? No, you'd think the sun has this enormous gravity. It pulls everything to its center but it's actually in terms of sheer amount of energy and rocket power, it's actually a lot easier to get to the edge of our solar system to get to Pluto than it is to get to the sun. And there's a reason

for that. So there's a reason why we don't fall into the sun here on Earth. I hope there's a reason for that. Yeah, there is a reason because the Earth has momentum. So we're traveling at something like 18 miles per second around the sun. And I read one really good description of it. It's like kind of like a merry-go-round. You can imagine if you're on a merry-go-round, it's easy to get flung off of it, but it's harder to get to the center of it. Yeah, I can see that. The first thing the probe has to do before it can get even close to the sun

is kind of just negate the momentum of the earth, kind of put the brakes on, and then it can fall into the sun. So what's the flight path once it starts falling? Is it sort of a straight path then? No. Over the course of these seven years, it's going to be making 24 orbits of the sun before it gets to its final location in terms of this mission. And it's going to use the gravity of Venus to help it slow down, to help it get there. So how different is this from any mission NASA's ever done regarding the sun in the past. Yeah, so I was talking to one of the project scientists on this, and he was explaining it to me that in one way it's like pure exploration. Yeah. So we've never been to a star before, and that's really exciting. We've been to all the planets in our solar system.

We've either flown by them, we have like the Juno spacecraft is orbiting Jupiter as we speak. But we've never been to our star, which is really cool. And the star is really important to learn about because while our star gives us life, it radiates energy that our plants can capture that goes up our food webs and gives us energy and creates life.

It could also be extremely disruptive for a modern society. It can potentially even knock out power grids or knock out communications or do really ugly things to the internet and to anything that runs on electronics. Honestly, the sun could really devastate human civilization as we know it what the sun could really devastate human civilization as we know it that's next on today explained so johnny you went to hong kong you took your Quip electric toothbrush that you got to get Quip.com slash explained with you. And then you lost it. Yeah, which was kind of unfair.

I mean, fate was playing a game on me because I really was trying to have this revolution in my own personal life with toothbrushing. I was like, man, I got to get serious about this. I had been kind of judged. At the tender age of? 30 years old. Yeah, okay. And then I lost it. And so I lost it.

And so I was kind of a dark place in my toothbrushing career. Yeah. And I was ready for a new start. For the entire time you didn't have your quip, did you just forego brushing your teeth or did you find an alternative? I had this crappy travel toothbrush that folds in half that's stashed in the depths of my backpack for emergencies. And I pulled that out. Okay. So you get back stateside, you're working on your Borders videos, which are out now, we should say.

Yeah, so four of the five episodes are out. The last fifth one goes out on Wednesday. So it's been a big, very exciting time for Borders. Maybe we can celebrate this week you're having the final video from your Borders series in Hong Kong by talking about how your whole family's doing with Quip electric toothbrushes now. I think that seems the only appropriate thing to do at this point. Brian Resnick, before we went to the break,

you mentioned that the sun has the potential to destabilize civilization as we know it. How? Have you ever heard of a coronal mass ejection? No, but it sounds very dangerous. It can be. In the corona, in the sun's atmosphere, extremely energetic plasma can sometimes explode outward from it and get released from the sun and kind of get flung across the solar system.

Oh. On this kind of giant and energetic and violent solar storm that has a lot of electromagnetic radiation, a lot of charged particles. What does it look like? You actually can see videos of this. Another mass emission, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, can actually take pictures of these.

And if you Google Solar Dynamics Observatory, you can see some really awesome videos of kernel mass ejections where it's basically, it looks like, whoa. I don't know if you're like a teen and you like things that explode and huge fiery shows.

They kind of build up, build up, build up, and then they kind of explode in like a big filament of fire. Energy and all that. Yeah, it kind of looks like a messy fireball spewing off the sun. Yeah. It looks like a burp sometimes too. Just like this enormous burp. Anything you look at in the sun is probably like

many times larger than the earth. So imagine you're looking at this explosion and it's just so frightening. It's as biblical of an event in our solar system as you can think of. So has one of these things ever hit the Earth? Yeah. There was a solar storm in 1859. It's called the Carrington Event. So a solar storm, likely from a coronal mass ejection, hit the Earth, and telegraphs around the world went haywire. So they were surging with electricity. They were really reacting to the electromagnetism from the solar storm.

I think some people got shocked if they touched it or things like that. So solar weather does disrupt our communications satellite every now and then. So actually the American Geophysical Union put out a report the other week saying that during one of the hurricanes last year, a solar storm actually disrupted some radio communications in one of the hard hit areas in the Caribbean. So space weather can make our terrestrial weather scarier and worse. So if you can't radio someone in a storm because there is solar activity, like that's really scary. You want to know about that. And you're saying if another coronal mass ejection hit us now, to the extent that we're dependent on technology, it could, what, shut down our entire communication system? Yeah, there are fears that it can really bring down power grids and will mess up things that run on electricity.

Like everything. Like everything. Like everything. Okay. And this is part of the reason why we're going to the sun, because physicists don't really understand solar weather enough to predict it. They don't understand how things get so powerfully energized in the solar corona. They don't understand what causes a coronal mass ejection to start. They don't even really understand what really causes the solar wind, which is just the steady stream of particles that are emanating out of the sun at extremely high

velocities. They don't understand how those get energized and accelerated. So there's a lot of these interrelated problems that all come down to, like, why is this region so violent? And the more we know about it, the more we can hopefully one day predict better solar weather and perhaps prepare for it better. And the Parker Solar Probe, when I was talking to one of the NASA solar physicists on this, I asked him, well, why can't we answer these questions from Earth? And there are just some things, he explained, that we have to go there to find out because by the time some of these particles, some of this plasma gets to the Earth where we can study it with our telescopes, it's been degraded.

It's changed on this journey from the sun. And once we know more, what do we do? We just have better, it's been degraded. It's changed on this journey from the sun. And once we know more, what do we do? We just have better, it's like better forecasting. Is that all we get? The hope is like if they better understand the physics of it, we can better prepare for forecasting in the future and perhaps better understand ways that we can protect ourselves. You said it's called the Parker Solar Probe. Is Parker someone worth knowing?

Yeah, Eugene Parker is a physicist who, I think he's 91 now, and he was the first person to theorize the idea of solar wind, predicted the existence of solar wind in 1958. Predicted it, like he didn't know, he just had a hunch? Yeah, well, the idea was that this region of the sun was so energetic that he predicted it would actually accelerate particles to a degree fast enough that they would escape the sun's gravity and spew out into the entire solar system. And he was right. And he was right. What is it like to have a major NASA mission named after you?

It's a bit of a thrill, I have to admit. And this spacecraft is the first spacecraft named after a living person, and he actually got to see the launch of it. Well, I really have to turn from biting my nails and getting it launched to thinking about all the interesting things, which I don't know yet. I'm just waiting for the data now. All I can say is, wow, here we go. We're in for some learning over the next several years.

And is this something that only NASA can explore? Like, while SpaceX is launching a convertible into Earth's orbit and taking funny photos, NASA's actually working on an important mission to the sun. Yes, NASA is partnering with companies like United Launch Alliance, like SpaceX, to make rockets for them and to get things into space. But it's really NASA that's really driving the scientific questions that we're answering in space and our solar system.

Brian, is this going to work, or is it just a hopeful experiment? NASA seems pretty confident that this is not going to work or is it just a hopeful experiment? now. And if there is a problem and if something does happen to this very expensive spacecraft, $1.5 billion, it's something they're not expecting. Like a coronal mass ejection? Like a coronal mass ejection. No, there is some risk. It's going into an intensely violent and energetic region of space. But they seem pretty confident that it's at least going to get there and we're going to learn things. And it's going where nothing has ever gone before, at least human-made.

So whatever risks are there are going to be worth it. We'll have you back in seven years to find out what happened. Yes! Yes, book it now. Brian Resnick is Vox's resident scientist. I'm Sean Ramos-Verm. This is Today Explained. Hi, this is Ada Singh, a listener from California. And I don't quite have a favorite episode, but what I do have for you is a top five list of my favorite Today Explained episode titles. Number five,

Too Jewel for School. Four, You and HR See Ya Later. Three, How Do You Solve a Problem Like Korea? Two, You're Terrifying Us Apart. And one, Yes We Cannabis. Don't forget to follow the show on Twitter at today underscore explained johnny before we go i should mention that um in addition to outfitting your entire family with quip electric toothbrushes you also all are now getting free refills have you had to rent a storage unit for all of your new well paraphernalia the avalanche hasn't come in yet i think they come in every like month or two yeah yeah i started getting refills from the original one that i lost so now i have extra but man the avalanche is coming yeah but they're free so it's okay that's right your first refill is free when you go to getquip.com slash exploit yes indeed