For the first time in history, a spacecraft has touched the Sun. NASA's Parker Solar Probe has now flown through the Sun's upper atmosphere—the corona—and sampled particles and magnetic fields there.
Space Exploration
Dec 14, 2021
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66
On April 28, 2021, at 0933 UT (3:33 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time), NASA's Parker Solar Probe reached the sun's extended solar atmosphere, known as the corona, and spent five hours there. The spacecraft is the first to enter ...
Space Exploration
Dec 14, 2021
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8063
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know space is weird. But just how weird might surprise you. Space is dominated by invisible electromagnetic forces that we typically don't feel. It's also full of bizarre types of matter ...
Space Exploration
Dec 13, 2021
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74
Water is vital for life on Earth, and some experts say we should all drink around two liters every day as part of a healthy lifestyle. But beyond the tap, where does our water come from?
Earth Sciences
Nov 30, 2021
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36
There's a pretty significant disadvantage to going really fast—if you get hit with anything, even if it is small, it can hurt. So when the fastest artificial object ever—the Parker Solar Probe—gets hit by grains of ...
Space Exploration
Nov 30, 2021
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36
The Solar Orbiter space probe had a brief encounter with its home planet on Saturday morning when it circled the Earth for the first and last time while executing a gravity assist to slow itself down before setting off for ...
Space Exploration
Nov 29, 2021
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22
Blazing along at space-record speeds that would get it from Earth to the Moon in under an hour, NASA's Parker Solar Probe completed its 10th close approach to the sun on Nov. 21, coming within 5.3 million miles (8.5 million ...
Astronomy
Nov 26, 2021
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507
It's been 70 years since physicist Enrico Fermi asked his famous question: "Where is everybody?" And yet, the tyranny of the Fermi Paradox is still with us and will continue to be until definitive evidence of extraterrestrial ...
Astronomy
Nov 23, 2021
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168
The Parker Solar Probe spacecraft, NASA's newest and most ambitious effort to study the sun, has broken a lot of records: it has gotten closer to the sun than any other spacecraft to date, its instruments have operated at ...
Condensed Matter
Nov 8, 2021
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334
When a fast solar wind stream erupts from a coronal hole (a cooler region in the Sun's atmosphere) and overtakes a slower moving solar wind stream, a stream interaction region (SIR) can form. In the SIR, a density "pileup" ...
Astronomy
Sep 20, 2021
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