See it: Closest image of Sun yet taken by NASA's Parker Solar Probe
This week, Nasa released new images taken by the spacecraft from the record-breaking close approach of the Sun, including from an instrument called WISPER. As Parker skimmed through the Sun's outer atmosphere, known as the corona, it used the Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) to observe the corona and solar wind.
Nasa's Parker Solar Probe Makes Historic Christmas Eve Flight Through Sun's Atmosphere
The video below was created with images from WISPR, which shows solar wind in never-before-seen detail. According to NASA, this close-up shows what happens right after solar wind comes blasting out from the corona. It also shows multiple collisions of coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, the space weather phenomena most known for creating aurora lights on Earth.
This data could be key to understanding space weather, according to Angelos Vourlidas, the WISPR instrument scientist with Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.
NASA said as CMEs collide, their trajectory can change, making space weather forecasting more difficult to predict if these charged particles are headed for Earth.
Still, scientists do not know how solar wind is created.
"The big unknown has been: how is the solar wind generated, and how does it manage to escape the Sun's immense gravitational pull?" said Nour Rawafi, the project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. "Understanding this continuous flow of particles, particularly the slow solar wind, is a major challenge, especially given the diversity in the properties of these streams — but with Parker Solar Probe, we're closer than ever to uncovering their origins and how they evolve."
Parker Solar Probe was named after the heliophysist Eugene Parker, who first theorized this concept in 1958. Parker was at the launch of the spacecraft with his namesake in 2018. He passed away at 94-years-old in 2022. https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-mourns-passing-of-visionary-heliophysicist-eugene-parker/Original article source: See it: Closest image of Sun yet taken by NASA's Parker Solar Probe
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