By Count Friedrich von Olsen
I am not much of a scientist. In fact, I am not anything resembling a scientist. But right here, before your very eyes, I am going to make a scientific prediction which I will lay you odds I am going to get right. And all of those egghead NASA scientists who have IQs on a magnitude of three or four times mine will, I am confidently prognosticating, get it wrong. Are you ready? Here is my prediction: The Parker Solar Probe will not complete its mission. It will fail. It will burn up…
For those of you who don’t know, the Parker Solar Probe is an unmanned mission that is supposed to travel to within four million miles of our sun’s surface, and actually reach a point inside its Corona, or outer layer. Mind you, the Parker Solar Probe is purposed to get seven times closer to the sun than the 1976 Helios 2 mission, which is the closest any earth-launched spacecraft has ever gotten to our sun, at something like 27 million miles…
According to NASA, after the Parker Solar Probe gets inside the Corona, sensory equipment aboard it will begin making a survey of the environs there, make all order of electronic measurements, and take visual metrics using telescopes. Some of the most critical observations will pertain to solar winds which reach speeds that dwarf our paltry 236 miles per hour top speed winds here on earth. It will make a study of solar storms and solar flares, the phenomena which cause problems with our power supply on earth and sometimes cause electronic circuits on the satellites circling earth to fritz out. In general, we will gather all order of physics data we heretofore never had and can only speculate about. All of this data will be collated and beamed back to us on earth…
Along the way there are going to be some really neat secondary things about the journey that would be of interest and excitement to even the dullest among us, like the way the spacecraft will maneuver to get where it is going by utilizing the gravitational pull of Venus to slow to a mere 400,000 miles per hour for its flights into the sun or the velocity it is designed to achieve as it passes around the Sun, something like 120 miles per second, making it three times faster than the fastest man-made object to date…
At least that’s the way it is supposed to work. But I am skeptical. Think about this: Here on earth, we are 92,955,807 miles from the sun. Put another way, that’s getting pretty close to 93 million miles. The Parker Solar Probe will reach a point roughly 3.8571 million miles from the sun. My guess is it is going to be pretty damn hot where this spacecraft is going. The Poindexters with NASA have pinpointed this at 1,400 degrees. I have a feeling it is going to be hotter than that, but as I said up top, I am not a scientist, so trust them rather than me. But, bear in mind, there will be other things to contend with, like solar flares and solar winds and what not. Supposedly they are outfitting the Parker Solar Probe with a 4.5-inch-thick heat shield with which to protect the probe’s instruments and antennae and all of its navigational and propulsion equipment so it can zoom in and zoom out and zoom in again and zoom out and so forth. My instinct tells me that four-and-a-half inches of insulation is insufficient and when the spacecraft gets somewhere in the neighborhood of ten million or nine million or eight million miles distant from the sun, the heat will get to it. That is just my unscientific, my ignorant, opinion…
Launch is scheduled for July 31, 2018. It will make flybys of Venus on September 27, 2018; December 21, 2019; July 5, 2020; February 15, 2021; October 10, 2021; August 15, 2023; and October 31, 2024. It is scheduled to make its first close approach to the sun on December 19, 2024…