Won a prestigious international award The Parker Solar Probe mission is leading a real scientific revolution

This mission is described as being in the process of making a real revolution in our knowledge of the sun, given the amount of discoveries it has made so far, and the unknown solar phenomena that it seeks to decipher.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe mission recently received an International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) award in recognition of the efforts of the team supervising the construction and operation of the first "touching the sun" probe.

Specialists believe that this mission is heading to bring about a real revolution in our knowledge of the sun, given the size of the discoveries it has made so far, and the unknown solar phenomena that seek to decipher its mystery. What has been achieved from these discoveries so far?

Extraordinary mission

By August 12, four years have passed since the launch of the Parker Solar Probe mission, full of achievements, discoveries and awards, the latest of which was the (Laurels for Team Achievement) award presented by the International Academy of Astronautics, which was received by Dr. Nour El-Din Al-Rawafi, the official The scientific mission for the mission, according to an official statement published on the NASA website on July 28, last year.

In an exclusive interview with Al-Jazeera Net via social media, Dr. Al-Rawafi, professor of astrophysics at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, says that the importance of the discoveries and achievements made by the Parker Solar Probe team made many organizations International awards are given to the mission, including this prestigious award, adding that “the results of the probe’s work have been published in more than 600 scientific researches so far.

Unlike previous missions devoted to studying the sun, the Parker probe is the first to come close to studying it closely. Therefore, high hopes pinned on him to unravel many mysteries that have remained unexplained for decades.

Dr. Noureddin Al-Rawafi, Scientific Officer of the Parker Solar Probe (NASA) mission

The mission is exceptional in many respects. Sending a probe to orbit close to the sun and controlling it is a major technical challenge. "This would not have been possible without benefiting from a number of advanced technologies that enabled the protection of the probe as it approached the sun and its optimal conduct," according to Al-Rawafi.

These advanced technologies included a durable and lightweight thermal protection system, water-cooled solar panels, a powerful self-control system, and high-precision equipment.

Despite its proximity to us, many solar phenomena are still mysterious and incomprehensible to this day. The Parker probe seeks to study 3 of the most important of these phenomena, the first of which is to search for the reasons for the increase in temperature from 6 thousand degrees on the surface of the sun to about one million degrees at an altitude of only 3 thousand kilometers inside the solar corona located outside the sun.

The second task is to study the causes of the acceleration of the solar wind. "These winds, made up of protons, neutrons, and ions of some light elements, suddenly increase their speed to reach millions of kilometers, even though they do not exceed 10 kilometers when they originate, and we do not know where the particles gain energy to increase their speed in this amazing way," says Dr. Al-Rawafi.

Zigzags in the solar wind are found everywhere around the sun, according to data from NASA's Parker Probe.

The third task that Parker is working on is studying how solar flares, or solar flares, that occur on the surface of the sun release high-energy particles at the speed of light and pose a communication hazard.

'Big discoveries'

So far, the probe has completed 12 of the 24 planned cycles, making it gradually approaching the sun, reaching its closest point, only about 6.1 million kilometers from the surface in 2024. The mission has already made great strides towards achieving its main scientific goals to study the winds Solar and energetic particle environment around the sun.

Scientists made several important discoveries thanks to the data sent by the probe, the most important of which was the historical discovery about the spread of zigzags in the solar wind, which is characterized by very high energy and disappears when moving away from the sun, but it is not as rare as previously thought.

Scientists had discovered, a few decades ago, that there are some strange bends in the magnetic field lines of the solar wind in the form of the letter "S". They believed at the time that these zigzags are accidental and are limited to the polar regions of the sun, "but the Parker Solar Probe probe discovered that they are not really rare, but rather common in the solar wind, and determined their place of origin near the surface of the sun," says Al-Rawafi.

A probe to study the sun, approaching a star.  Elements of this image were furnished by NASA.  3d rendering.  https://images.nasa.gov/details-GSFC_20171208_Archive_e001435 software:blender

The Parker Solar Probe still has more than 3 years of work to unravel some solar phenomena (Getty Images)

The probe was also able to discover the "dust free zones" around the sun, which are known theoretically since 1929, and they are formed during the approach of small particles to the sun as a result of the influence of its strong gravity, but in turn they are exposed to resistance to radiation from the sun. , which serves to repel it and keep it away.

The remote monitoring methods that have been used over the past decades have been unable to discover these areas, but the Parker probe has managed, since its first orbit around the sun, to capture clear signals of the presence of these areas, according to Dr. Nour El-Din Al-Rawafi.

The Parker probe is currently at the height of its performance, and its position around the sun can be followed through this link , and it still has more than 3 years of work to decipher some solar phenomena that have remained unsolved for more than a century, "which will pave the way for major discoveries in the future," according to The mission's science officer, we may hear about one of these discoveries about the solar wind in the near future.