Funacular

Space News

You Can Send Your Name to the Sun!

March 8, 2018

By Lora Snow

NASA is inviting people around the world to submit their names to be placed on a microchip aboard NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. This probe will orbit the sun, and will actually travel through the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, about seven times over the next seven years.

On its final three orbits the probe will fly within four million miles of the sun, that’s 89 million miles closer to the sun than the earth is.

William Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk in “Star Trek,” is taking part in this adventure, and he wants you to join him. In a NASA video he says: “The spacecraft will also carry my name to the sun, and your name, and the names of everyone who wants to join this voyage of extreme exploration. . . . This summer, we’re going to touch the sun.”

NASA says name submissions will be accepted through April 27, 2018 here: http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/The-Mission/Name-to-Sun/

Temperatures in the corona are actually much hotter than they are on the sun’s surface. The surface temperature of the sun is about 10,000° F (5,500° C), and the temperature in the corona can reach over one million degrees F (550,000° C).

The coronal plasma (an ionized gas of electrons, protons, and heavier ions) has a low density. As a result, the heat transferred to the probe will primarily be from sunlight. It’s expected to heat the probe’s heatshield to nearly 2500° F (1,377° C).

Illustration of the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft approaching the Sun.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben

The heat shield, made of carbon-composite material that’s 4.5 inches (11.43 cm) thick, is designed to keep the probe’s instruments at room temperature. The instruments will study the sun’s magnetic fields, plasma and energetic particles, and image the solar wind at room temperature.

According to NASA’s Mission Overview, the spacecraft “will fly close enough to the sun to watch the solar wind speed up from subsonic to supersonic, and it will fly through the birthplace of the highest-energy solar particles.”

NASA said in a statement that the mission “will revolutionize our understanding of the Sun, where changing conditions can spread out into the solar system, affecting earth and other worlds.”

NASA research scientist Eric Christian told Funacular Space News that while the primary mission is for the probe to complete twenty-four orbits in about seven years, the mission could last longer. He said the end date depends on how long the fuel lasts. Christian said when the spacecraft runs out of fuel, the heat shield will no longer always be facing the part of the sun it needs to face in order to protect the spacecraft, and the spacecraft will melt.

He added, however, that the heat shield, parts of the solar arrays, one of the solar wind instruments, and four antennas are designed to withstand extreme heat, and may continue to orbit the sun for millions of years.