The Parker Solar Probe - Smarter Every Day 198

have you ever figured something else and you tried to explain it to someone else and they just didn't believe you this is the story about a man named Eugene Parker who in 1958 wrote a paper about solar winds NASA has named about 20 spacecraft after distinguished researchers however NASA has never named a spacecraft after researcher during their lifetime it is my great honor a few days before your 90th birthday gene to announce that we're renaming the Solar Probe plus spacecraft to be known from now on as the Parker Solar Probe congratulations I wrote my speech down here I'm certainly greatly honored to be associated with such a heroic scientific space mission by heroic of course I'm referring to the temperature the thermal radiation from the Sun every human that has ever lived has looked at the Sun and thought about it and this is mankind's best effort to understand it it is time for us to go to Kennedy and ask hard questions ok we made it so there is a NASA press site over here we're gonna go in there and see if we can find a scientist so this is the press building and all these different stations are set up with people that are involved in the launch and the science and we walk up and ask questions pretty cool go stare right here I mean this is super super informal excellent and Destin and Anjali you work with mr. Parker so I'm the physical sciences division Dean at the University of Chicago so now I'm sort of responsible for all the physical sciences in Chicago but my history in the 90s was a researcher much junior than Jean and now I'm you know a senior researcher and he is now happy to be watching a launch of the probe the Parker Solar Probe this is named after him his life's work right it's his life's work he's incredibly humbled and just loves physics he loves astrophysics and loves to understand the universe by sitting down writing equations trying to understand how the physics in the cosmos works the stuff we know on earth how does it get translated out there and he would do that from an early age and then when he came to the earth of Chicago he was very puzzled by what was going on with you know for example Comet tail's and other issues with the solar system as a whole and sat down and wrote the equations that we call hydrodynamic equations for what would look like this plasma from the Sun all the way to the edge of the solar system and what he found was that there would be the solar wind and he had a very hard time publishing that paper because people didn't believe it people thought no way there is no wind supersonic speeds coming from the Sun all the way to the earth there's nothing between the Sun and the earth it's really you know just empty space and there shouldn't be any problem flying out there for example turns out he was right and those who were very skeptical about him I thought made him see it like what made him think it was there it was physics you know so people had the equations that explained the universe right so people would make models and they assumed there was nothing so if you assume there's nothing between the Sun and the earth then you know your solution will tell you zero but if you look a little deeper and you say well wait a minute could there be something he would which is what he did and he found yes there is this whole solar wind nobody believed him so he had a hard time publishing this is 1958 by 1962 he got a bit lucky compared to many theorists because his theory was proof four years later and that's what Marino two did very precisely on its way to Venus and made it very clear that that's the solar wind the Parker Solar Probe really was you know decades of work by many many scientists getting close to the Sun is no piece of cake right so the Sun is very hot the corona is even hotter so it's an amazing design the most impressive technological jump was the the solar the shield before we go talk to the people that actually built the Parker Solar Probe my daughter and I thought it'd be really fun to make a model version for ourselves so we went to the craft room and made some Awesomeness be jealous so after talking to Angela I kind of think of a spacecraft now like a shield on a Roman sold right the enemy is the solar radiation and no matter where the spacecraft is it is always pointing that shield towards the Sun to protect it from the enemy which is you know the thermal loading that would kill this thing in 10 seconds as a matter of fact anyway there's two things that had to be developed in order for this mission to happen the first one of these high temperature solar panels and the second one is the shield itself so to learn about that let's go talk to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics lab this is Philippe from Johns Hopkins right yep over mechanical that beauty lead mechanical for the Parker Solar Probe so this is a big day for you races this is a day that for me has been for years in the making from those two the team at Johns Hopkins 10 years in the making really and for for the space community for NASA this was a mission that was proposed in 1958 really so there's people that have been waiting for this for 60 years so you got on right at the tail end got it right on I'm talking about I think the timing was perfect you call it the Sun shield or they so we call it the thermal protection system the TPS yeah and it's it's really what's letting us fly this mission it's the reason why we haven't pointed in 60 years because we can't come up with the right materials to do it so the shield is a carbon carbon foam Santas between two carbon carbon reinforced panels when we're close to the Sun wherever in our last three orbits of the close approached the top of the shield will see 1,300 degrees Celsius it's about 11 centimeters thick and when you get to the bottom you're at 300 degrees Celsius so do you have radiators so we do but the radiators are for the solar arrays one of the really interesting challenges in this was figuring out how to power the spacecraft because we're going close to the Sun right and so you have all of the solar flux you could ever want in the world but the ones you can melt them right so the moment you get an array out there it's gone and that's another of the key enabling things we've done is these arrays instead of being built on like a honeycomb panel like usual satellite arrays are we've built them on a titanium platinum micro channels flowing through it and it's not fancy cool it's just the ionized water from a tank about this big inside the spacecraft that circulates here through the arrays comes up to these two conical surfaces and those are our radiators and so that takes all the heat from the arrays and picks it out the deep space so the sunshield is hyper important so here's a question I have if we are 8 light minutes away from Earth and anything that gets exposed in the back here to direct sunlight gets killed instantly how do we keep this thing pointing because you can't get a signal there and back quick enough and the answer is fascinating on the back of the spacecraft there are these the light sensors and if you think about it as you're pointing up there as you start to tilt off axis to start to expose things those little light sensors get exposed first you see that way up there right well when that happens the reaction wheels on the spacecraft itself they use those to realign to make sure that they're pointed directly at the Sun which is fascinating I think it's a really neat design feature next thing this is called a Faraday cup let's see if we can figure out how that works I'm Destin Tony Tony case in and who are you with I'm with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory so we're part of the Smithsonian which is a lot of museums and a lot of research centers and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory is affiliated with Harvard up at the harvard-smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge Mass and so this is the instrument that's poking out from behind the thermal protection system this is it so this is a qualification model we used it to test before we built the actual version that's on the spacecraft so I wanted one but this is a one-to-one copy exact size exact same materials and everything so what's the mesh right here so that's a tungsten a fine tungsten grid 90% transparent and the particles flow through that it is tungsten because it has the highest melting point yep and it's the hottest portion of the instrument right at the center that grid gets up to a 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit and then behind the grid you can see in the front is another grid that we put at 6,000 volts that creates an electric field the charged particles then get reflected out because of that electric field or they make it through if they have a high enough speed and then you're detecting those and then we detect them in the very back there's a piece of metal that you won't be able to see here but these four wires connect to that piece of metal and so as the charged particles impact the metal they deposit their charge and we measure that as a current that's coming out through those wires so on these wires right here yeah so this is high-voltage going up that drives the high-voltage grid and then the wires inside here are carrying the signal coming back so you're driving the high voltage grid to guide what's coming in yep we can select the speed of particles that we want to measure by putting a certain voltage on the grid so it is your wire made out of copper it's made out of niobium what niobium yeah copper would melt it's way too hot for copper okay so it's made out of niobium so how do you insulate something like that so it's insulated by a little sapphire beads so it's not be amaan the outside here and then sapphire beads what and then the niobium wire runs through each of those little bits of sapphire and through these little corners where there's little elbows made of sapphire and in that way the center conductor is insulated from the outer conductor so this is like so basically you get a bunch of unobtainium and fantastical Lloyd and you put them together and made it a CRT tube that's way more fancy than that ya know I mean think of it as a like a vacuum tube that's basically what it is and it operates in vacuum so you don't have to enclose it in glass and so that's pretty much what it is and you can select the speed of particles that are coming in with a voltage and and then and regulate the current that you end up with on your collector plates in the ultimate goal of this device which is one of the main main pieces of science on the spacecraft is to count neutrinos what is that the word so this is think of it as like what the Sun is made of okay there are a lot of neutrinos coming from the Sun but it's made of mostly hydrogen and helium those are the bulk constituents of the universe and of the Sun and so the the hydrogen comes out as ionized hydrogen or just protons and the helium comes out as typically doubly ionized helium so typically it would have two electrons both of those are stripped off we call those alpha particles if you're talking about radiation and those are the two main constituents of the solar wind along with electrons and we measure all of those so you're measuring flux yes so you're measuring like as you get closer and closer to the Sun you're going to be able to understand the density of solar wind not coronal mass ejections because I'm assuming that kill you if that happen no well mo measure those bull yep so bull you're not gonna be able to you're to take a coronal mass ejection to the face right to the face so yeah so the so the cool thing about coronal mass ejections is it's basically the same plasma that is there all the time it's just ejected in slightly more dense form and faster what are you talking about I can see it what you see is you can see the solar wind - okay in a coronal mass ejection Parker Solar Probe fastest man-made object ever decade's worth of science engineering miracles all over the place when you dig into the hardware this is a fascinating mission I love it the thing that makes this the fastest man-made object in history is the Delta for heavy and the next video is me walking up to the delta 4 heavy pad with Torrey Bruno the CEO of the company that made at ula and just talking to him about the rocket it is fascinating I mean like you talk about access like it's on the pad it's insane please check that video out it's amazing if you want to see the rest of these interviews like in their entirety that's over on the second channel and this next thing you're about to watch is after we'd stayed up for 24 hours after launch we've been driving for many hours and we've been up for 24 hours how's that feel Trent we're almost here 'z the deal I want to say thank you to the sponsor for this video which is audible when we're on road trips a good way to stay awake and a good way to engage your brain is getting audiobooks right now we're listening to how to think a Survival Guide for a world at odds by Allen Jacobs there's gonna be differing opinions in this comment section because it's a YouTube video right so this book is really really good to get rid of your cognitive biases it helps you think about the other side's opinion and how you process that tells you a whole lot about yourself so you can get this audiobook by going to audible.com/smarter get a 30-day trial first books free or text the word smarter 2 500 500 again that's audible.com slash smarter or text the word smarter - 500 500 that's a big deal it helps smarter every day it helps me pay for things like Trent your thing that would be a big help also this this experience was amazing and it's really hard to compress all this into one video so I'm just now going to do it there's too much good stuff here we're gonna make another video I mean Torre Bruno showed us around the top of the MST and it's just amazing right we got to talk technical with the man who's an actual rocket scientist on top of the tower next to his rocket please consider subscribing to smarter every day if you don't mind we're almost home and we're trying to do it safely so I'm Destin you're getting smarter every day have a good one bye

Channel: SmarterEveryDay

Views: 1,220,271

Rating: 4.962564 out of 5

Keywords: Smarter, Every, Day, Science, Physics, Destin, Sandlin, Education, Math, Smarter Every Day, experiment, nature, demonstration, slow, motion, slow motion, education, math, science, science education, what is science, Physics of, projects, experiments, science projects, nasa, parker solar probe, thermal protection system, goddard visualization studio, Delta IV Heavy, United Launch Alliance

Id: aQaCY7wlQEc

Length: 13min 50sec (830 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 24 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/jordanja]

Hey, my name is on that probe! My wife's and both of my children's names as well! NASA had a program they referred to as a " Hot Ticket " that you could sign up for until the end of April 2018 where they saved your name to a microchip onboard the spacecraft and gave you a cool certificate.

Very cool to see videos about the probe! I saw the upcoming video about the rocket, but did you get to watch (and will there be a video about) the launch?

Tons of neat information about the probe and the mission if you click here

[u/falsehood]

Props for driving after 24 hours w/o sleep, that's no fun.

[u/mcgtx]

Hey /u/MrPennywhistle, awesome video. I watched the excellent interviews as well on the other channel, just wanted to throw out that the only equation I know of that goes by the inverse of the radius to the fourth power is Poisseuille's Law. First learned about it in aerospace engineering, but also incredibly important in anesthesiology with all the tubes and catheters we use. Don't know if that's what you had in mind, but that's what came up to me. Keep up the fantastic work!

[u/RADicalChemist]

If you want to learn more about the sun shield you should check out Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, they exposed samples of it to 3,227°F at 65 watts/cm^2 using ORNL's radioisotope power systems program and plasma-arc lamp facilities!

​

https://www.ornl.gov/content/nasa-probe-parts-pass-ornl-s-sun-simulating-exposure-tests

[u/bigbear4985]

This was a great video...learned what namibium was!!!

[u/twat69]

Oh my virgin ears, Destin cussed.

Was anyone else surprised to learn that it's harder to fall into the sun than to escape the solar system?

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/digoryk]

2 In that day the branch of the Lord shall be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land shall be the pride and honor of the survivors of Israel. 3 And he who is left in Zion and remains in Jerusalem will be called holy, everyone who has been recorded for life in Jerusalem, 4 when the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and cleansed the bloodstains of Jerusalem from its midst by a spirit of judgment and by a spirit of burning.[a] 5 Then the Lord will create over the whole site of Mount Zion and over her assemblies a cloud by day, and smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night; for over all the glory there will be a canopy. 6 There will be a booth for shade by day from the heat, and for a refuge and a shelter from the storm and rain.