By Count Friedrich von Olsen
Where were you a half hour past midnight early Sunday morning, August 12? I know exactly where I was: In the theater at my palatial Lake Arrowhead estate. Normally, I am fast asleep by 9 p.m. most nights, even on the weekends. My days of tripping the light fantastic are decades past. But I and the rest of the von Olsen household had good reason to be in the theater Sunday morning, just as we had been early Saturday morning, which turned out to be something of a disappointment. We had assembled, all of us, at that dark hour to watch the launch of the Parker Solar Probe…
As regular readers of this column have already learned, the Parker Solar Probe had long been scheduled for launch on July 31, 2017. However, a series of snafus had delayed the take-off. We were told that the all clear was set for August 11 at 3:33 a.m. Eastern Daylight Savings Time iat Cape Canaveral. That is 0733 Greenwich Mean Time, or 12:33 a.m. for all of us locals here in Southern California. So, I stayed up more than three hours after my bedtime Friday night, preparing to watch the launch. The planned launch time was pushed out another hour and as launch time approached just before the 1:38 a.m. Pacific Time close of the launch window was approaching, they had to scrub it until the next morning because of a problem with the heliums system. So I was up late again Saturday night into Sunday morning to watch the blast off as the Delta IV Heavy rocket took the Parker Solar Probe up, up and away into space, a magnificent spectacle on the theater’s oversize screen…
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. Incredibly, 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…
The Parker Solar Probe, incidentally, was designed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and is named after Eugene Newman Parker, an American solar astrophysicist who in the mid-1950s Parker developed theories and predictions with regard to supersonic solar wind and the spiral shape of the solar magnetic field in the outer solar system, all of which were initially doubted or question but subsequently proved out by satellite observations in the 1960s. Eugene Parker is almost one of my contemporaries, though he is a bit my junior. Without him, we would not have our current understandings of the solar corona, solar winds or the magnetic fields of both the Earth and the Sun, and the complexied electromagnetic interactions these involve.
NASA has designed it so that 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 malfunction. It is to gather all kinds of physics data we do not yet have and which our most knowledgeable scientist can only speculate about. All of this data will be beamed back to us on earth…
For those of us fascinated by the march of technology and the toys that science has created, this machine is really something. The spacecraft will maneuver to reach its destination 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…
That, of course, is how NASA says all of this will go. I am wishful that all of this will come off. But as the faithful readers of this column now, I am doubtful. I know those NASA eggheads are way smarter than I am. They just are. But still, I am worried about all that heat…
Consider this: On earth, we are 92,955,807 miles from the sun, just 44,193 miles less than 93 million miles distant from that cosmic inferno. The Parker Solar Probe will reach a point roughly 3.8571 million miles from the sun. That’s something like 24 times closer than we are. My guess is it is going to be pretty damn hot where this spacecraft is going. Hotter than Hades, to coin a phrase. The Poindexters with NASA have pinpointed this at something about 3 million degrees Fahrenheit. Still, according to NASA’s, the Parker Solar Probe’s outer surface is not likely to heat to over 2,500 degrees. That is because, they say, the corona will consist of plasma, which while superhot, is not very dense, meaning, again according to the scientists, that the probe’s heat shield will come into contact with relatively few particles. The heat will diffuse over the entire outer surface – this space age heat shield enclosing the entire probe. And this is no ordinary heat shield. This 4.5 inch barrier is the most advance insulation ever conceived or rendered into actuality. In this way, according to NASA, the inner workings of the Parker Space Probe – its instruments and antennae and all of its navigational and propulsiton equipment – will get no warmer than 85 degrees Fahrenheit…
Well, gentle readers, I’m not buying it. My sense of things is that that four-and-a-half inches of material designed to prevent the conduction of heat will not live up to its billing and fail. When the spacecraft gets somewhere in the neighborhood of ten million or nine million or eight million miles distant from the sun, I predict, the heat will get to it. That is my impression, unsteeped in any sort of scientific knowledge or expertise, other than my conception of the physical reality I know…
I hope I am wrong. But I have put my money where my mouth is, even as I would be thrilled to be proven wrong. I laid out $1,000 bets with my household staff at 1,000-to-1 odds. All of them, liking the odds, took me up on it: my butler, Hudson; my chauffer Anthony; my cook, Mrs. Culbertson; my groundskeeper Manuel; by proctor/bodyguard/taster Hans. They have each assured me that they will dutifully pay me in-kind services valued at $1,000 upon NASA reporting that the Parker Solar Probe has evaporated into space. I, on the other hand, have agreed to fork over to them the sum of $1 million if the probe merely survives long enough to broadcast data to earth some six years and four months from now when it makes its first close approach to the sun…
The Parker Space Probe is tentatively scheduled to make its first flyby of Venus on September 27, 2018; a second on December 21, 2019; a third on July 5, 2020; a forth on February 15, 2021; a fifth on October 10, 2021; a sixth on August 15, 2023; and a sixth sojourn near Venus on October 31, 2024. It is scheduled to make its first close approach to the sun on December 19, 2024 and then return to have another near encounter with Venus on November 2, 2024…