Enhanced NASA spacecraft It once again reached speeds approaching 400,000 miles per hour.
This is the fastest any man-made machine has ever flown, and speeds will only continue to increase.
America space Authorities recently Parker Solar Probe — the first mission to fly through the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona On June 29, during his 20th close approach to the Sun, he tied his own speed record of 394,736 miles per hour (635,266 kilometers per hour).
Objects often gain speed when passing through an object with a strong gravitational force. SunAnd in the void of space, it’s nearly impossible to stop this ship from going faster and faster.
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“Once it gets going, it’s not going to move again,” Noor Raouafi, an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and project scientist for the mission, previously told Mashable.
(Sometimes, when the spacecraft makes strategic passes, it slows down slightly. Venus This is due to a “gravity assist” that brings the probe closer to the Sun: the Venus flyby will slightly slow the probe’s momentum, but will eventually pick up more speed as the probe approaches our massive star.
“Once it gets going, it’s impossible to stop.”
After the probe completes its final mission to Venus later this year, it will reach an astounding speed of 430,000 miles per hour — enough to travel from San Francisco to Washington, DC, in 20 seconds.
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The green line in this diagram shows that the Parker Solar Probe has orbited the Sun 20 times, reaching a distance of about 4.51 million miles from the Sun.
Credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University APL / Steve Gribben
While flying at a blistering speed of 760 miles per hour, more than 500 times the sound barrier, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) The probe will reach a record distance of 3.8 million miles from the sun’s surface, but it’s well equipped to withstand the sun’s scorching heat. Engineers built the Parker probe with a 4.5-inch-thick carbon heat shield that faces the sun. The shield itself will heat up to about 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, but the environment just a few feet behind it will be surprisingly comfortable. “Most of our instruments are operating at room temperature,” Lauafi said.
This unprecedented probe into the Sun’s atmosphere will not just break records: Scientists will use the observations to understand how extreme space weather caused by different types of solar eruptions behaves and what its ultimate impacts might be. EarthFor example, our wayward star can eject vast amounts of super-hot gas (plasma). Coronal mass ejectionCMEs, or CMEs, occur on Earth. These events are Power Grid and Communications Networks — Historically Melted transformer causing electrical system failure, They locked up people who knew nothing. In the elevator.
