NASA's Spacecraft "Touched The Sun" - What Does That Mean? 

Gotta pump her up!

A True Goddess already knows...

I facepalmed at, "this is a much better photo!"

It was clearly a test to see if she watches his videos 😂

@@markwilson7013 if we never get another video then we know she watches them

Wow! If the tolerance is just 0.040", I'd never use nails to attach it 😆 SCNR

that is VERY cool, did you get to monitor it when it entered sol's atmosphere?

Good job then

Congratulations bruh

Kudos

V'jer will come home someday.

Is it? I'm really asking. I'm trying to conceptualize what physical attributes to the components denotes it's ability to maintain functional longevity?

@@Allenmarshall It is mostly about temperature problems. The other nice bit is the reactor itself. That the reactor is continuing to provide energy decades after it's intended lifespan is a testament to engineering of the highest order. Likewise, that the computer has not simply stopped operating because of the seriously extreme temperature difference across the mother board is another testament to engineering.

@@willierants5880 If we can catch up to them with future spacecraft, then it's possible for us to make it to them.

It was a Star Trek movie reference @@Andre83572 . You might have missed it.

Yes - it's explorations like these that make one glad to have lived long enough to witness them. It's an outstanding time to be a scientist, or any kind of curious sentient on this third rock from the Sun....

We have the same profile picture

Ii

Ii

That experiment continues to do wonders for our understanding of the sun; it's coming back into mention as we find /the Earth/ can synthesize every element up to iron; supernovas are getting put out of business here!

Off topic, but nice to see another 1802 programmer. I cut my teeth on that chip.

@@heikkilevanto5929 *software "engineers" bowing*: we're not worthy!!!

@@anthropicandroid4494 wait, what? The Earth is creating these elements? How? (Is there a specific term I should search Google for to learn more about this?)

@@HunterGeophysicsAustralia "Earth creates elements" gets me a bunch of articles, likely pointing to the same studies; there's also evidence of fusion on the surface of white dwarfs, IIRC

I wasn't that simple.

@@WWeronko I feel like I've drunk one hour of 2nd year astronomy class straight out of a can of concentrate.

If I understood him correctly, then a couple hundred kms below the sun's surface it is dark? Like I always assumed it would get brighter/more luminous the deeper you went into the sun. Like if you bury a camera in soil it would be dark, but if it could withstand high temps/pressure if you tossed it in a volcano and it 'sunk' I'm pretty sure the lava would be luminous... Thought the same for the sun.

seems like there is something about a saying: "compression is a sign of intelligence"

@@HansWaldenmaierNo, it is not dark, it is optically thick. What I mean can be best represented by thinking about a very thick fog or very murky water. When you're in the fog you might not be able to see the light of a torch more than some tens of meters from you, since it is absorbed or refracted away, so you would be in the dark with respect to that torch. Imagine now that the fog were to emit light of its own, then you would be surrounded by an uniform amount of bright light. That's how you should imagine being inside a star: being surrounded by a terribly bright uniform light all around that is emitted just a few meters from you, while not being able to see light emitted from elsewhere within the star. Your comparison to being in the lava is, in fact, correct. You see only the light emitted from the layer of lava nearest to you, while the light produced behind it is absorbed before it can reach your eyes.

@@samuelecolombo1861 great explanation!

@@samuelecolombo1861 thanks for the clarification. That's what I originally thought, but when I misheard or misinterpreted what he said I thought the new (wrong) idea was kinda cool... And was a little excited by the idea that inside a star it's dark... But that kinda went against stuff I had heard about it taking a really long time for photons created in the star center to migrate to the corona and escape... Anyway...

Ok brony cringe

yeah and this gets weirder and weirder with these super-hyper-whatnot-giant stars, that can be light hours across and very luminous (I think Betelgeuse would still be brighter than our own Sun if it were place 4 lightyears away, where Proxima C is) but whose mass does not scale up likewise... these stars are actually quite thin. our Sun by the way is much smaller than these superstars, but it is _not_ a small star --- almost all stars are in fact smaller than our sun.

hard same

IF U BELIVE THIS U NEED TO GET OF THE DRUGS LOL

@@starseedrelaxation1589 NEGATIVE STARSEED I AM CURRENTLY INSIDE OF THE DRUGS

@@starseedrelaxation1589 FCK YEAH CAPS LOCK!!!!1111oneone

At that speed a piece of dust would make that bad boy EXPLODE if! it ran into it

@@General12th CAN CONFIRM, I SEEN U THERE, SITTING ON A GIANT FLOATING PURPLE BEAN BAG, BETWEEN BOB ROSS AND JIMI HENDRIX.

I think they are detecting plane waves too.

And most amazingly, the paper for which he got the Nobel prize is just 1 column in Nature, just under half a page...

He also adhered to the theory of electro-plasmic origins, which states that (in the title of the popular explanation book by Eric Lerner) "The Big Bang Never Happened." It is a book that I recommend most highly.

@@craiga2002 A sad example of Nobel disease. The prize cannot be awarded posthumously (the reason for which is rather subtle) but I am starting to wonder if awarding it to somebody who is still alive is not just cruel.

If we assume it experiences 0.05% of the speed of light all the time, that's not too difficult to calculate. It's the Lorentz factor minus 1 times the amount of time we have experienced (if we assume we are not experiencing it ourselves). If I did the math right, the Lorentz factor at that speed is 1.00000012, so it experiences time only marginally slower than on Earth, or it loses about 2 seconds every month at that speed.

"touching the sun" _still_ makes more sense than "touching the sky"

NASA in general is terrible at public relations with people that are not scientists. their website looks like something I would make in the early 2000s.

@@danilooliveira6580 reason for that might be that NASA are scientists and their primary job is research and gather/interpret data. People like Scott then can take this data and dumb it down for the rest of us.

Really appreciate your in-depth explanation. It’s really grateful to have thoughtful words. On a side note, therefore I wish RU-vid could better facilitate viewer conversation, sorry to digress, I always feel comment section is lackluster for some reason. For example, lots of time our comment are not received or have not reached the amount of viewer it intends or deserve to reach. Good words or comment deserve to reach more people, but RU-vid seems not made comment to function or evolve towards facilitation of intellectual exchange of words or viewership. And lots of comment are not seen or read at all but buried in the ocean of comment-if not deleted or partially deleted-for some reason you can’t post two comment otherwise the first one will be deleted by RU-vid. so sometimes I would like to ask, what’s the point. That is one of the reason I barely comment on RU-vid because I know RU-vid Only post a few short comment on top and rest are just buried in a pile no one read. RU-vid really need to change to better facilitate conversation or words in comment and their viewership.

​@Robert Nelson Really appreciate your in-depth explanation. It’s really grateful to have thoughtful words. On a side note, therefore I wish RU-vid could better facilitate viewer conversation, sorry to digress, I always feel comment section is lackluster for some reason. For example, lots of time our comment are not received or have not reached the amount of viewer it intends or deserve to reach. Good words or comment deserve to reach more people, but RU-vid seems not made comment to function or evolve towards facilitation of intellectual exchange of words or viewership. And lots of comment are not seen or read at all but buried in the ocean of comment-if not deleted or partially deleted-for some reason you can’t post two comment otherwise the first one will be deleted by RU-vid. so sometimes I would like to ask, what’s the point. That is one of the reason I barely comment on RU-vid because I know RU-vid Only post a few short comment on top and rest are just buried in a pile no one read. RU-vid really need to change to better facilitate conversation or words in comment and their viewership.

NASA IS A LIE MY FRIEND

Oh yes, in fact they have to factor that into the orbit or they'd miss their gravity assists at Venus.

@@scottmanley " time distortion" Damn! I *knew* I forgot something in my calculations! "🤪 I shoulda checked with Scott earlier!! 🤔

@@scottmanley So that Einstein fella was right after all, by golly.

@@yes_head It's almost like he put a lot of thought into this.

they'll have to be careful they are not slung back to '69 ...

Read Earth by David Brin... Startide Rising series is excellent as well...

You don't think the JWST is moreso than the PSP ?

One of the earliest proposals to build a solar probe came from Van Allen, in 1958. There were many conferences and proposals since then, especially in 1970s and 1990s. Soviets had "Tsiolkovsky" sun probe that was in development in 1980s. In 1990, Russian and American probes were developed to be launched together on a single Proton rocket. Eventually, the US "Solar Probe" became "Solar Probe Plus", finally got fully funded by NASA, and this is what is flying today. Only relatively recently it was renamed as Parker Solar Probe, to commemorate the scientist who contributed to the studies of the Sun. Getting close to the Sun is a very tricky business in terms of orbital mechanics!

The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 I think you might have your probes mixed up There are a few solar probes operating today Some were launched 20 years ago or more

@The Mighty Sagetto JWST might not even work. And it has cost about $10,000,000,000 so far. That's a lot of money for one telescope. Even if it sends us back a million pictures, each image will have cost at least $10,000. If it fails to reach its intended orbit, that's $10 billion wasted.

Equally amazing is how Scott Manley could combine these two seemingly unrelated engineering marvels taking place in our solar system concurrently into one 11 minute narrative on RU-vid. Even more amazing was how he threw his wife's random picture of the sun into the mix and still made a hell of a sense. I congratulate him!

We live in exciting times. 😁

With the right kind of film over your windows, you don't even have to hang it.

Audio from the probe. " They Might Be Giants - Why Does the Sun Shine? Live (official-audio only) " on the channel " ParticleMen "

More They Might Be Giants - Meet the Elements (official TMBG video) on the channel TMBGkids

Couldn't have said that any better, Robert. I wholeheartedly agree, and am very much looking forward to Scott breaking down all of the new data drops!

At 11% of the speed of light the difference in kinetic energy from classical vs relativistic equations is 1%, so none of uor probes are close to being considered relativistic. Note: i did just google and take the second result, it looked fairly sound, so do take with a large grain of salt.

Under another comment Scott pointed out that time dilation effects did indeed affect the probe's orbit and had to be considered for the gravity assist at Venus to work

It's not much, but the effects will definitely be noticeable and accounted for.

GPS has to account for relativistic effects to get the timings sufficiently accurate, and those satellites aren't moving anything like as fast.

@@owensmith7530 ​ While the relative velocity of the satellites is a factor (approx. -7µs per day), the much larger factor is us being further down a gravity well than them (approx. +45µs per day), but both are absolutely critical for the required nanosecond accuracy.

His work was not initially accepted, but eventually he won a Nobel Prize.

Plasma physicists these days know far more about astrophysical plasmas than Alfven ever did. They know when, and when not, to use MHD. He also got it horribly wrong about magnetic reconnection, which we now see on the Sun, and contributes to the coronal heating. As for a 'network of currents' .............. nope. We might notice that. Plasmas are quasi-neutral beyond the Debye length. At 1 AU, in the solar wind, that is ~ 10 metres. In the Sun's atmosphere, MHD is applicable, as Alfven said himself. In fact, it is applicable in more situations than Alfven realised. The magnetic Reynolds number of the solar wind, for example, is ~ 200 000, iirc. That makes MHD perfectly fine to use in most circumstances. Only when the solar wind interacts with another atmosphere, such as at a planet or comet, do we need to look at the applicability of MHD. It's complicated, but plasma (astro)physicists know what they are doing.

It might be helpful to contact him on twitter

Yeah the probe probably interfered with the magnetic field lines and produce a tiny sun spot that should have not existed without the probe.

I had no idea the Parker in Parker Solar Probe was still with us. Thanks for this I’ll have to do some looking up of this fine person.

@@fensoxx I remember I was amazed he was alive when the project was finally proposed around a decade ago (technically it was 2009 I think, but serious work began slightly later) - and most people wouldn't bet on him living to see the result of his then 50 year old proposition (it's going to be 64 years since he proposed first "solar probe"). He was always "almost famous". If you were interested in Astrophysics - you'd probably at least vaguely remembered his name. If you were interested about Sun - he was one of the experts that you'd know about. But a lay person that "only" looks at stars and is interested in Astronomy... well he never had that much of a name recognition. Which was sad, because he was always a very nice man. Of course now he is famous, but that's because of the probe's name, rather than the idea. If probe was simply named "NASA Solar Probe" - most people to this day would not know of him.

will we be able to leave any of that knowledge behind in a useful form once we are gone? are there artefacts floating about in the universe that encode the sum knowledge of intelligent species that are long gone? it sounds like a Star Trek premise, but it is actually a valid and deep question

Disaster Area would be happy :)

chips are more sensitive than old fashioned "macroscopic" components, you know, like we played with in the 70s. I imagine they use such circuitry where they can. also the wires are inserted with gemstones!

Well, it does have a materialised shield in front of it, keeping the electronics just stable enough to work.

It's behind a bright white heatshield. All of the instruments look outward from the sun or parallel to the sun so none of them need to see the sun directly (except one that peaks out from behind the sunshield).

@@Ergzay Yea, it's a teacup-sized measurment instrument. (the one that peeks out)

@@noorspetsialist5547 ...now I imagining small instrument with googly eyes going Yeeeeeah :)

@@randomnickify Cue the KSP-built probes taking a kerbal along to probe the Sun. The Kerbal just peeking out over the rim.

The only remaining challenge remains harnessing so much energy that acceleration from and deceleration to respective orbital velocities become possible inside a couple of tens of hours. Then the trip would be days, not months.

@@daszieher Not just energy... you will sustain a lot of G forces.

@@SilmarilS79 yup, disregard the gee for that assumption. There could be a way to make the human body withstand (much) higher acceleration without blacking out or physiological damage by immersing the astronauts in liquids about as dense as blood. Cutting edge g-suits use liquid instead of pneumatics to regulate pressure on the lower limbs.

This old man can't detect it, which makes him very depressed! ;-)