Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A big year for heliophysics and Parker Solar Probe

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

Our Sun is nearing the most active part of its solar cycle. This week, we explore recent solar activity and discoveries from NASA's Parker Solar Probe with Nour Rawafi, the mission's project scientist. But first, we honor the life and legacy of Ed Stone, the former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the longtime project scientist of the Voyager mission. We close out our show with Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of The Planetary Society, in What's Up.  Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2024-parker-solar-probeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Solar Maximum is just around the corner, and the sun's been putting on quite a show. We're diving into the intense world of solar science with Parker Solar Probe, this week on Planetary Radio. I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. We're right in the middle of the heliophysics big year, and the sun is not disappointing us. Did you catch the amazing aurorae last month? The sun's activity was so intense that the northern and southern lights were spotted dancing in unexpected places. It's the perfect time to discuss recent solar events and discoveries with Noor Rawafi, project scientist for NASA's Parker Solar Probe mission.

But first, we'll honor the life and legacy of Ed Stone, the former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the longtime project scientist for the Voyager missions, who recently passed away. And of course, we'll close out our show with Bruce Betts, our chief scientist in What's Up. If you love planetary radio and want to stay informed about the latest space discoveries, make sure you hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcasting platform. By subscribing, you'll never miss an episode filled with new and awe-inspiring ways to know the cosmos and our place within it. We now take a moment to honor the extraordinary life and career of Dr. Ed Stone, a trailblazer in space exploration who passed away earlier this month at the age of 88. Ed had a passion

for discovery that propelled him to the forefront of space science, serving as the director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1991 to 2001, and leading the iconic Voyager mission for an astounding 50 years. His impact extended far beyond the science, though. He was a mentor and a gifted communicator who inspired countless scientists and engineers. We've received some beautiful and heartfelt messages from his colleagues and friends that we'd like to share in his memory. Here are some of their reflections on Ed Stone's contributions to the space community and their lives. on Ed Stone's contributions to the space community and their lives. This is Matt Kaplan, Senior Communications Advisor for the Planetary Society and former host of Planetary Radio.

I envy the scientists and engineers who work for and with Ed Stone, some of them for many decades. My five encounters with him were relatively brief, of them for many decades. My five encounters with him were relatively brief, but they allowed us to talk about the things he seemed to care most deeply about. Ed was always ready to share his profound dedication to exploration of our solar system and beyond. Like every great scientist I've met, he also wanted everyone to experience the passion he had for this quest. And like all great leaders, he wanted to help all around him be their best. It has been my honor to interview five JPL directors. Each brought or brings unique qualities to the job of running the world's

foremost center for robotic exploration. None surpassed Ed's ability to do this with soft-spoken determination and purpose. His voyage will continue for as long as we pursue it, which I trust will be for as long as his spacecraft will wander among the stars. My name is Alan Labrador, and I have worked in Ed Stone's group at Caltech's Space Radiation Laboratory for over 20 years. As with many others, I will always remember Ed as an insightful scientist, a strong leader, and a great mentor. But the memory that is most personal to me is when I defended my PhD thesis. Ed was chair of my committee. I don't remember my thesis defense much. After I finished, I was sent out of the meeting room to await the committee's decision.

I don't remember how long I waited, but I remember the sound of the door opening behind me. I turned to see Ed walking toward me, smiling, with his hand outstretched. And he said, congratulations, Dr. Labrador. It was the first, and remains the most meaningful time, anyone had ever called me Dr. Labrador. And I will cherish that memory. Dr. Labrador. And I will cherish that memory. My name is Alan Cummings, and I'm a senior research scientist at Caltech. I work in the space radiation lab that Bobby Vogt and Ed Stone founded way back in the 60s. And I've known Ed Stone for 57 years. Ed was a brilliant scientist, 57 years. Ed was a brilliant scientist and he was the best multitasker I ever met. And one example of that was when he was the JPL director for 10 years in the 90s,

he was still working on projects at Caltech in his lab. He worked closely with me on Voyager data in the evenings and weekends. And one time I was at the chalkboard and Ed was in the office and we were discussing something about our Voyager data. And he got interrupted and said he had to go to Washington, D.C. right now because he needed to meet with the NASA administrator. So he left. And a few days later, he comes back and he comes back to my office, and he motions me up to the chalkboard. I get up there, and we resume our conversation just where we left off, right in mid-sentence. We didn't need to go back over anything for Ed. He was on top of it. My name is Eberhard Möbius, Professor Emeritus at the University of New Hampshire Space Science Center and Department of Physics and Astronomy. I admire so much his gentle but very firm leadership.

first visit to Caltech when I mentioned to him the idea that perhaps Alfven's critical velocity might play a role in the observed abundance patterns in the solar corona and cosmic waves. He rushed me to the Caltech library in his well-known stride to find relevant articles. The idea didn't hold up, but I preserved a wonderful memory of my first meeting with Ed Stone. In a colloquium at MPE in the mid-1980s, Ed unveiled an audacious yet conservative vision for the Voyagers continuing for another two decades. As we now witness, sheer reality has even surpassed his predictions. Among others, Voyager is a testimony to the depths of his understanding, his vision and the magnitude of his contributions to space science.

Dear Ed, thank you so much for your inspiration and support. Travel safely on your last journey. Hey, this is Jim Bell, planetary scientist from Arizona State University, member of the board of Planetary Society and past president of the society. I first encountered Ed at JPL during the Voyager, Uranus, and Neptune flybys in the 1980s when I was working as an undergrad for a member of the Voyager imaging team. I have to say I was immediately impressed by his calm and collegial demeanor during the intense and stressful times around those flybys for the scientists and engineers involved.

And I was also impressed by his clear conversational style with the international media, because, of course, the spotlight was on Voyager as the space event of those times. More recently, I had the pleasure of actually getting to know Ed in person when he helped provide over the course of several years a number of interviews and reviews of material for my book about Voyager called The Interstellar Age. was absolutely critical as I struggled to understand and translate many of the very technical and esoteric concepts of Voyager's interplanetary and interstellar fields and particles instruments and research. And of course, this was Ed's specialty. Ed Stone was a brilliant and impactful scientist, instrument builder and mission team leader and a talented and effective public communicator. And he was also a great friend of the Planetary Society. He'll be greatly missed as a mentor and a colleague in our community.

We also received this message from Gary Hunt, a member of the Planetary Society's Advisory Council. Gary worked for JPL on the Viking missions to Mars and the Voyager Grand Tour of the outer planets. Gary wrote, Ed Stone was a brilliant and inspirational scientist and an outstanding leader of the everlasting Voyager mission and a wonderful friend and colleague for more than 50 years. Every one of us involved in the Voyager mission have so much to thank Ed Stone for. Ed Stone will be missed by all of us. involved in the Voyager mission have so much to thank Ed Stone for. Ed Stone will be missed by all of us. However, the Voyager spacecraft continuing on their paths as messengers from Earth to distant worlds will be an everlasting memorial to his lifelong contribution to science and space exploration. He will be missed greatly. You can listen to the extended versions of these recordings on the webpage for this episode of Planetary Radio at planetary.org.

And if you want to add some of your memories of Ed Stone to our page, please feel free to email me at planetaryradio at planetary.org. The Voyager spacecraft are still venturing into the uncharted depths of interstellar space. But closer to home, our star has been stealing the spotlight. The sun goes through a solar cycle that takes about 11 years, transitioning from a relatively calm star to a crescendo of solar storms called solar maximum. We're almost at that maximum now, which is why we've been experiencing so many sunspots and solar flares.

And in the last year, we've had an annular and total solar eclipse in North America. To mark all of the solar festivities and research that's happening all around the world, scientists and space enthusiasts have been celebrating a year-long event called the Heliophysics Big Year. And in the midst of all of this, we've recently had a flurry of powerful solar flares that produced the strongest geomagnetic storm to impact Earth since 1989. Today, we're discussing the recent solar events and discoveries with Dr. Noor Roafi, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and the project scientist for NASA's Parker Solar Probe mission. This spacecraft, designed and managed by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in the United States,

was launched in 2018. Parker Solar Probe is on a daring journey to unlock the secrets of our sun's corona, or our star's outer atmosphere, and it's soaring closer to our sun than any spacecraft ever has before. In order to do so, it has to endure some scorching temperatures and the intense radiation to gather data. Noor Rawafi's research explores the mysteries of the corona. He's an expert on solar magnetic fields, coronal mass ejections, shock waves, and the solar wind. With Parker Solar Probe venturing closer to the sun than ever before, Noor Awafi is leading the charge and unraveling some of the biggest

questions about our nearest star and how that impacts life on Earth. Hi Noor, welcome back on Planetary Radio. Hello Sarah, it's really a pleasure to be with you to talk about the Sun, Parker Solar Probe, and many other things. I have to mention, I love your name because my family almost named me Noorah, which means light in Arabic. So I feel like that's a really fitting name for a solar scientist. Absolutely, yeah. And actually, many times I've been introduced, and the first thing people say about my name, yeah, your name means light, and the first thing people say about my name, yeah, your name means light, and you are working with light all the time. So you are born for that.

On point. And I know it's been a few months since the Parker Solar Probe team received NASA's Group Achievement Award, but I wanted to send our congratulations. That was awesome. Thank you so much. I think the team has been doing an amazing job and they deserve all the recognition they are getting. By the way, this is our fifth award in five years. Hopefully we'll make it to seven because our prime mission is seven years and my goal is

to make seven awards for Piper Solo Cope in the first seven years. Well, it keeps beating records and then beating its own records. I think at this point it's the closest mission to go to the sun, the first one to touch the sun, the fastest human-made spacecraft. And I want to say the first one to fly through a coronal mass ejection that close up, is that the four records right now? Yeah, it's the first one to fly through the solar corona, through the coronal mass ejection closest to the sun ever. So yes, absolutely. Man, that's an intense thing to go through. But thankfully, this spacecraft is designed to do exactly that. And we've gotten so much amazing science out of it. But for people who haven't listened to your appearance on the show before or other Parker Solar Probe episodes, how did you design the spacecraft in such a way that it can take not

only flying through the corona, but through a coronal mass ejection? Well, Parker Solar Probe to start with is not really a new idea at all. People start thinking about a probe to fly close to the sun back in the late 50s. But it took us over six decades to build a spacecraft that can fly safely close to the sun. And it took us six decades because simply we did not have the technology to do so. So back in 2001, NASA has commissioned the Applied Physics Lab of Johns Hopkins University to look into material to build the heat shield. Because without the heat shield, we cannot fly close to the sun. And it took us five or six years to come up with the right material the right design and everything and it's then when nasa

decided to go ahead with the mission so it's it's really been a matter of having the technology to mature enough that you can build a spacecraft that is robust to withstand the harsh environment around the star and when you say a harsh environment, it's really probably one of the harshest environments you can ever fly through. But still, Parkasur's probe, it's been orbiting the sun for almost six years now. And the spacecraft is pretty healthy. And knock on wood, it will continue so. And honestly, if you ask any team member before the launch, although we did not

speak out loud about it, but we were pretty nervous. We didn't know how this spacecraft would behave close to a star. But from the get-go, Parker Solar Probe was doing so well, way better than we expected. And as a consequence, the missions expended so much. Now we are doing so many things that before the launch, we thought, yeah, we wouldn't be able to do. And yeah, it's thanks to all the, probably the most marvelous team that put so much effort into this mission to make it one of the most successful missions in NASA's history. I remember thinking that when I was first seeing the videos in the lead up to Parker Solar Probe's launch, they did these wonderful explanation videos where they would have a

piece of the heat shield. People would put their hand on one side and then blowtorch the other. I mean, not like a blowtorch is as intense as the sun, but at that moment, it kind of crystallized in my brain this was actually possible, which is amazing considering what you guys are pulling off. Absolutely. I mean, the head shield is one of the components that enabled the whole mission. So without it, we wouldn't do the mission. But whenever you look on this spacecraft, there is edge-cutting technology. If you look, for example, at the solar panels,

conventional solar panels cannot work close to the sun. So we have basically to reinvent the new solar cells. And on top of that, you have to cool them down because when we are close to the sun, they get pretty hot. And we use a liquid-based cooling system. And the liquid we use, many people will not even guess it, is just a simple gallon of water. Really? Yeah, just a simple gallon of water. Really? Yeah, just a simple gallon of water. That's what we use to cool down the solar panels. But to me, one of the most amazing aspects of Parker Solar Probe, and by the way, this will impact all future

missions, is the autonomy system. So when we are flying close to the sun, we cannot talk to the spacecraft. And probe has to deal with any problem it might run into. On its own, we cannot do anything to it. So the autonomy system we have on board of the spacecraft can run Parkasol or probe for up to almost two months without any human intervention whatsoever. And to me, that's really amazing. The amazing part of it is the team members who designed this autonomy system thought of every potential problem that the spacecraft might try to and come up with a solution to it.

And so far, it's been working flawlessly. It's amazing. That's really impressive. Trying to even anticipate all of the edge cases And so far, it's been working flawlessly. It's amazing. Especially when you're trying to communicate with something that's really far away, that time delay can be really challenging. But if the time delay is intersecting all of this radiation and all these particles coming out of the sun, I can't even imagine that you could even get a signal through. It's pretty hard. It's pretty hard. When we are close to the sun, just forget it. You cannot talk to the spacecraft.

It's as simple as that. And that's why probe has to stand on its own facing a huge star. We didn't know how this small spacecraft will face this star that we never flew by before. We didn't know how it's going to behave. I mean, one of the scenarios, it might actually encounter major problems. It might actually fail. Well, it was one of the possibilities. But we tried to do everything possible, it was one of the possibilities, but we try to do everything possible, do every source of tests on the ground to make it fly and fly safely.

Well, your team has done a fantastic job. All of those awards are well-deserved, and I wouldn't be surprised if you hit the number seven. Thank you. Earlier this episode, we took a moment to honor Ed Stone from the Voyager missions. And I wanted to take a moment to share the Planetary Society's condolences to you and your team for the loss of mission director Purva Varya. I know that's a very difficult thing. And he contributed so much to solar science and was an inspiration to so many people. So I wanted to pass that along.

Thank you so much. Losing a team member is always difficult. It's not really an easy thing because you live with the team for years and it's not really a team anymore. It's family. And when you lose a family member, it's not really that easy, but still we keep all the nice memories about him and about Ed Stone. Yeah, it's a bit difficult, but yeah. Yeah, you know, here's to all the giants whose shoulders we've stood upon, and I'm sure one of these days people are going to look back on your contributions and think very much the same thing, because this mission is blowing my mind every time I look into more of the data and the results coming out of it. It's just absolutely spectacular. Well, we're in the middle of the

Heliophysics Big Year, which is a global celebration of solar science that ran from October 2023, which is when we had an annual solar eclipse, all the way to the end of this year. And there has been a lot to talk about in solar physics. We just passed a solar eclipse, a total solar eclipse on April 8th that went through Mexico, the United States and Canada. Did you get a chance to see it? Yeah, it was in Carbondale. I saw the eclipse and seeing an eclipse is always exciting and amazing

because there is no eclipse that looks like another one. The solar corona is always changing. And whenever you see one, it's like a new experience all the time. But when you see the excitement of the people out there about this celestial event, that's another component of it. It's not only the sun, the moon coming between us and the sun. It's actually the whole atmosphere, the build-up to it, everything.

It's amazing. I can tell you a little story. I was at the Dallas flying to give a colloquium about solar eclipse. And I had some material with me to give away. And some of them are the glasses for the eclipse. And the members of the TSA crew, actually one lady asked me, are these solar eclipses glasses? And I didn't even tell her yes or no. I told her, how many

do you want? And I gave her some. Then another one came, then another one came, then another one. I think at the end, I was surrounded by seven or eight of them. And we were talking about the eclipse, talking about the sun. They even asked me about the largest star in the whole universe that to me showed the degree how this uh remarkable phenomenon like like the spectacle like total solar eclipse how much attention it attracts out there and it's an opportunity for us to talk to talk to everybody out there about what we do what we know, what we don't know, what we should do in the future. And it's really fun. I've mentioned this on the show before, but honestly, when you get a whole bag of solar eclipse glasses, just start passing them out to people, you become a hero. Because people,

they need those glasses. They get hard to find around the time of the eclipse. What was the spacecraft doing around the time of the eclipse. What was the spacecraft doing around the time of the eclipse? So, Parkasol, from just a few days before the eclipse, flew very close to the sun. And during the eclipse, it was on its way out, flying away from the sun. It was still very close to the sun. But the amazing thing is, we have the other spacecraft, which is a NASA mission, a solar orbiter. The two spacecraft came so close to each other. They were almost on top of each other.

And also, by other coincidence as well, they were in the plane of the sky as seen from Earth. sky as seen from Earth. So when we see the solar corona, probe and orbiter were actually flying through the structure we saw during the total solar eclipse, which is so fascinating. So we see the eclipse from the Earth and probe and orbiter are taking measurements from there. And when you combine the two, you get outstanding things that we didn't get before. I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of results we get out of that. Because in 2017, we were kind of near a solar minimum. It was still a spectacular total solar eclipse, but we're gearing up for a solar maximum that even now has been impacting us here on Earth with a bunch of solar storms and solar flares. So comparing those two is going to be fascinating.

What do you think the experience of the solar corona was like during this solar eclipse versus previous eclipses you've seen? So you talked about the 2017 solar eclipse, and the sun was extremely quiet back then. And when you look at the structure of the corona, it was much simpler than what we saw in Eperon, and simply because the sun was very quiet. But still, the solar corona is always complex, and the complexity comes from the complexity of the physics that is ongoing with

the solar corona. But when you compare the total solar eclipse of 2017 to the one we witnessed back in april there is way more structures in the last eclipse in april than in 2017 and that's simply because we are very close to solar maximum and the sun is so active and it's it creates all sorts of eruptions and structures in the corona and you can see all of them and it's just fascinating. The nice thing as well, you're talking earlier about the Hylio big year and this really I would call it the Hylio super big year simply because you mentioned the annular eclipse back in November 2023, in April 8th, we got the total solar eclipse. Exactly a month later to the day, we got the solar and geospace super storm, where we saw aurora almost around the globe.

And that's really unprecedented. Obviously, the sun keeps active all the time. But by the end of the year, on Christmas Eve, we will be hitting the closest approach with Parker Solar Probe. And that's something we have been waiting for for over 60 years. I mean, all the excitement, it's like

it's building up for Parker Solar Probe to give us something marvelous at the end of the year. I'm just sad we didn't get to see a coronal mass ejection during the eclipse, but maybe in 2026. Why not? Yeah. I mean, that's actually one of the things I've said about the solar eclipse. I gave, I don't know how many interviews, and they said, there is one thing that we have not seen before, a coronal mass ejection seen by you with the

naked eyes. Close to solar maximum, yes, it's the opportunities there. We didn't have it, but there will be many solar eclipses in the future. We will see it one day. Speaking about aurora and all these solar storms you've been having, you brought up a lot of the solar activity that we had in May. And we had this massive series of storms, some X-class flares going on that caused some geomagnetic storms, and we were able to see the aurora in much more equatorial latitudes. I believe this was like the largest amount of solar stormage we've gotten out to Earth since like the late 1980s. Now, this storm is actually the third strongest in the whole space age.

Yeah, we're lucky it wasn't full Carrington event, but you never know. And that's part of why studying the sun is so important in these cases, because as a technologically advanced civilization, solar storms can truly impact us. I know I've had some friends be worried that they personally, their bodies might be damaged by these solar storms, and we're totally fine there, but how can it impact our other systems here on Earth? storms, and we're totally fine there, but how can it impact our other systems here on Earth? So, to your point, I was asked before, when this storm wasn't going, and the advice I gave everybody, go out there and enjoy the aurora. Nothing will happen

to us. We are not going to go extinct. Everything will be fine. If anything, technology will be affected a little bit, but that's it. But I told people the nice thing about this storm, that we knew it's coming. So there are certain steps that have been taken to mitigate its impact. And that's actually our goal, is to understand how the sun behaves, how it works, how it produces all the spectacles. That way we can mitigate its impact. I think the first assets that can be affected are space equipment, like satellites, communication, or GPS, and on that. But most importantly to me, it's going to be a big, big deal for us to deal with.

By the end of this decade, we're actually going to land women for the first time and men return to the moon again. And actually, it's not going to be a short visit. The plan is to have a permanent presence there. The only thing is, unlike Earth, where we have this magnetic bubble that is protecting us, out there on the moon, there is nothing to protect astronauts. So we have to keep an eye always on the sun, what the sun is doing, what it's throwing to our way.

That way we keep these folks out there very safe. That's one of the aspects of solar activity. The other aspect is it can actually affect us even much, much lower here near the ground. For example, if you take the last storm, certain flights that usually have cooler routes, they were actually routed to low latitudes to avoid the high doses of radiation that is due to these storms. I'm pretty sure there are other measures that were taken to protect any potential impact to the power grid. And there are other aspects as well that can be impacted by solar activity. And trying to anticipate how long it takes for these systems to impact Earth is a complex but really important question. And one of the results coming out of Parker

Solar Probe that I found really fascinating recently was the interaction between these coronal mass ejections and interstellar dust that falls into our solar system. This was such a fascinating one because we know that particles from beyond our solar system can make it in here, but it didn't really occur to me that it could impede or change how fast material from the sun reaches us. What were some of the results that we saw out of this flight through a coronal mass ejection? So the strongest coronal mass ejection that Parker Solar Probe flew through was on September 5th, 2022. That CME was traveling at more than 2,500 kilometers per second. And it was a huge event. And Parker Solar Probe was very close to the sun.

And it was a huge event. And Parkinsola probe was very close to the sun. And the funny thing, it was actually in the backside of the sun. So we don't know what probe is doing. So we have to wait for several days to figure out whether Parkinsola probe survived and what it did. But when it emerged on the other side, we knew everything is fine. We knew we have plenty of good data to look into it. There are many things that are so surprising about this event. First of all, the view we get from them when we are observing them close by, it's way, way different

than when you see them from one angle. The internal structure, the complexity within the structure is mesmerizing, but also the impact on the environment they are flying through is mind-boggling. We knew that whenever you have an event like that one, like big events like the one of September 5th, 2022, they will clear the plasma in front of them. But the most surprising to us is even the heavy dust particles, they were cleared by the CME. And what is left behind them is a near-perfect vacuum. Bacchus solar probe, when it was flying through there, when you see the images that we got from probe, it's like it's flying through the darkest night you can imagine.

Because it was flying through vacuum. And it took hours for that medium to be re-tubulated again by gas and dust and everything and that was that was kind of surprising to us. Well it's hard to imagine given the videos coming out of it before whenever it's flying through the corona it's just a cascade of particles and little zoomy things I can't even imagine getting nothing back on that camera. It's fascinating. And the first warning you get is you get this shower of energetic particles that are hitting the detector, but you see it very clearly. And we've seen it before for AU. And that's actually when I look at one of those movies and you see, actually, we call it the

snow shower. That's actually, if you are out there in space, that's the type of radiation you are getting. Your body would be receiving a lot. And that's what we have to protect the astronauts from. We'll be right back after this short break. Hi, I'm Asa Stahl, science editor from the Planetary Society. Are we alone in the universe? Humanity has been fascinated by this question for millennia, and today we are closer than ever to finding the answer.

Join me in a new online course from the Planetary Society where we'll explore the search for life beyond Earth. We'll journey through our solar system and beyond, guided by the leading scientists in the field, as we uncover what life needs to form and survive, and how we can use scientific strategies to potentially detect life on other worlds. Whether you're a curious space enthusiast or passionate advocate for exploration, this course will not only satisfy your curiosity, but empower you to actively contribute to our collective quest to discover life beyond Earth.

Remember, this exclusive course is available only to Planetary Society members in our member community. So join us today at planetary.org slash membership. That's planetary.org slash membership. I anticipate a future where we're going to need several Parker Solar Probe-like orbiters around the Sun just so we can anticipate space weather to protect our astronauts. Because if we're going to be out on the moon, if we're going to send people to Mars, we're going to need to know about this. Because even this recent solar storm caused aurora we could see from the rovers on Mars. That's amazing. Exactly. Actually, we are thinking about that as we speak. Going forward, we are not going to launch one spacecraft at a time.

The community out there is thinking about launching constellations of spacecrafts. When it comes to the sun, for instance, we are thinking of a constellation of spacecrafts that will look at the sun from different viewpoints. That way you observe the sun as a ball. It's not anymore like a disc. You see it here from one viewpoint. You only see one side of it. Now we want to see the whole thing. And there are reasons for that.

First of all, whenever you see a movie of the sun, particularly in extreme ultraviolet or extra ray, you see a lot of things changing because the magnetic field is changing all the time. And if you don't follow magnetic fields all the time, you're actually losing information. There is buildup for energy until the magnetic field explodes, snaps and then produce this. And if you don't follow it, you cannot really predict this event. Now we need full coverage.

We don't want to lose any moment through the evolution of these structures. The other thing also, it's a big puzzle for us, is what is happening in the solar interior itself where all the magnetic field is generated and comes to the surface. And for that one, we need almost a constant view of the solar poles for an extended period of time. And you cannot do it with one spacecraft. You need a whole constellation that will look at the sun altogether. And this is actually, this is not sufficient.

We need actually more than that. Because what we want to do, really, is look at the sun and make measurements in the Earth environment in exactly the same time, in the magnetosphere, in the thermosphere, the ionosphere, because we want to measure what the sun is doing and measure its impact in the Earth environment. That way we have the full picture of what is going on. And talking about the superstorm of May of last month, we're actually organizing a workshop here at the Applied Physics Lab in late October that will focus only on these four or five days. But for this one, we are going to

bring scientists from the solar side, from the magnetosphere, ionosphere, we'll put them all in the same room, and we're going to only talk about this two or three days and what happened there. What's very interesting about this is that it doesn't just impact how we think about our solar system and our sun's relationship to our planet, but as we're looking out toward other exoplanetary systems, there's so much about these planets that we can't anticipate because we don't understand how they interact with their stars. And it's true, most of the stars in our galaxy aren't stars like our sun. They're much smaller kind of stars. But even just any understanding of it at all could open up huge doors in exoplanetary understanding.

Absolutely. The sun in its heliosphere is the best laboratory to try to understand what faraway stellar systems are doing. And to me, the biggest question that we all want to answer is whether we are alone in this universe. And when I say alone, it's not necessarily we want humans like us elsewhere, whether life itself exists elsewhere. But it's really hard to imagine that among all these stars we have out there, there is not a place like us here where life can thrive.

I think we have to look for it. We have to keep looking. But to your point, we have a laboratory here. We know that life developed and it's flourishing and everything. And whatever we learn about it will actually help us. As a matter of fact, later this year, we are going to launch the Europa Clipper mission. It's going to study Europa. And Europa is one of the places where we have high hopes that probably there is light in it.

By the end of the decade, we'll be launching another mission toan that is being built here at epl the dragonfly is one of my favorite oh my goodness it's so cool it's it's amazing and there again the goal is not really oh well we want to look at how titan looks like but there is the reason behind it we want to figure out where the life is developing there whether there is chemistry that might lead to life and we are looking for all signs. And again, our best laboratory is the sun and its environment. There is another thing also I have to mention this every time we talk about the sun. Whenever we talk about solar activity and solar storms,

we always think about the negative aspect of it. Yeah, it's going to affect technology, it's going to affect technology. It's going to affect humans. But when you think of it, without the sun, without the solar activity, we wouldn't be here talking together today. Without that, life would not have kicked in on the Earth at all. And we owe our existence, our very existence to the sun. We're coming up on Asteroid Day on June 30th.

And there was a result about one of the meteor showers that we experience once a year, the Geminid meteor shower, which I believe is in December. And usually meteor showers are caused by comets. When they get too close to the sun, they spew a bunch of debris. And when we pass through that debris field, we see meteor showers. But the Geminid meteor shower seems to be caused by an asteroid, 3200 Phaethon. And we didn't know how that was possible until Parker Solar Probe ended up in this mix doing science on this asteroid. What did we learn about this meteor shower? And why were we studying an asteroid with a spacecraft? So that's actually one of the fascinating things.

You design a space mission to do something, but you end up doing so many other things with it. We did science on Venus with Parc de Soleil Probe Planetary Physics. And we are looking at comets. We are looking at Phaethon as an asteroid, and the fascinating thing about Phaethon, whenever we fly by the sun, we see this trail in the images, and that's actually the orbit of Phaethon, all the debris that is orbiting along that trail, and that's actually the origins of the meteor shower in Jebel. And one of the fascinating things is, Phaethon is a asteroid, but sometimes it acts like a comet. So it releases all this material that leaves behind to form all that trail.

But we have an undergrad student at Princeton. He has really probably the best eyes in the world. He notes something. That when you plot the orbit of faith in itself, that trail of debris is always a little bit outside of the orbit. And he asked the very smart question why that is. Why it's not on the orbit and why it's not inside the orbit. And then he did some numerical simulation and showed, okay, there are two processes to release material. If you have a gradual process like comets, that material will settle inside, a little bit inside of the orbit

when we are close to the Sun. But if it is a catastrophic event, then that material will settle a little bit outside of the orbit. And that's the case of Phaethon. Then what we think now is that Phaethon, maybe 2,000 or 3,000 years ago, a catastrophic event happened to it. It might be an explosion. We don't know what it is, but it's all speculation. But it is a catastrophic event that led to the formation of the trail that is the source of the Gemini

Chalup. And this is from a mission that we didn't even decide to look at. I can tell you something else about synergistic science from Probe. So whenever we fly by Venus, we use Venus to get closer and closer to the sun. So we love Venus a lot.

But whenever we fly by Venus, we turn all our instruments on. And one of the best flybys for us is when you fly in an eclipse formation, you are actually flying behind the planet on the night side of the planet. One of the programs we set early on is to look for clouds in the Venus atmosphere. And for us, who are not really physicists at all, we saw some dark structure and we were excited. Yeah, these are the clouds.

Only when we looked at other images from years ago from Venus, we saw exactly the same structures. It was kind of disappointing. Yeah, this is not. But for us, it basically ended up there. I was talking about this observation during a colloquium. And when colleagues here who are specialists of Venus saw that, they were so excited about that.

So they got the data. They worked with the red. And guess what? They discovered the shortest wavelength thermal emission from the surface of Venus. So Parker Solar Probe basically discovered what you would do to study the surface of Venus. And from there, using the same observations, we're actually getting some ideas and some results about the rock composition on the surface of Venus. So, Parkinson of Probe, in a way, is giving hints to future missions that will orbit Venus and study Venus in way, way more detail than Parkinson of Probe. But it's opening windows for them.

Look here, look there, look there. And that is really fascinating. Well, there's so much about Venus that we don't know. And we've got all these wonderful upcoming Venus missions. We've got JAXA's Akatsuki mission that's been looking at it, but there is so much we don't know about that world because its atmosphere is so thick and so deadly. Anytime you try to

send something to the surface, it fries or melts. The spacecraft actually has one more Venus flyby coming up. It's the last one, is that correct? It's the last one of the PIE mission, yes. And is it going to send it into a trajectory that's even closer to the sun? That seems a little wild.

Yeah, so the last Venus flyby, which will be on November 6th of this year, will set us for the closest approach ever to the sun. And this is the nice thing about the Venus flyby. It will be also the closest to the surface of the planet itself. We will fly in an eclipse formation again with Venus. So it's an opportunity for us to study the surface of Venus and the atmosphere of Venus. We will be so deep into the atmosphere of Venus that we honestly don't know what we're going to measure there. We will be in the ionosphere and we'll measure things. So we have a full program for that Venus flyby. It's already developed, already in place, and that data will be coming as soon as we fly by Venus. We cannot anticipate to look into it.

So that last Venus flyby will set us for the closest approach ever to the Spine, which will be on the Christmas Eve of 2024. And the timelines I've seen for Parker Solar Probe Online usually go till about 2025. Are there any plans for after that 2025 point? So the spacecraft, the payload is very healthy. The payload is very healthy. So the expectation, we have to propose for extending the mission, and we will propose for that, and I strongly believe that NASA will go for it, because Parker Solar Probe is an exceptional mission. It's probably the most

successful heliophysics mission that NASA has ever been. And what we are learning from Parker Solar Probe, we are actually solving big problems, but on top of that, we are discovering new ones, new phenomena. So it's really hard to think that Parker Solar Probe will not continue. But we will propose for it,

and just talking about the profile of the mission, we launched in 2018 when the sun was very quiet. We will end up the prime mission at solar maximum. Hopefully we'll extend it to cover the whole solar cycle and go beyond that. Well, on this page for this episode of Planetary Radio, I'm going to link to a lot of the other science results that have come out of this, and our previous episodes all about switchbacks in the magnetic field and the source of the fast solar wind, all those results.

But I cannot wait to see what comes out of all the science from this most recent solar activity. And I'm really hoping NASA extends this mission because it deserves it, honestly. And your team should be so proud. Thank you so much. I think it's not only the team. It's the much larger team who are making the mission so successful. We built the mission, but it's the folks who are out there doing science with it, and particularly young folks who are just coming up.

Those are the ones who discover all these nice results about the mission. We, the team, we can make the mission a success. The larger community will make a mission, make a success. And that's how Parker Solar Probe is doing. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Noor. And good luck on all of these upcoming flybys. I know your team is going to crush it.

Thank you so much. It's really a pleasure talking to you. Thank you, Sarah. If you'd like to learn more about Parker Solar Probe and the sun, the team at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab teamed up with some tech companies to create the ParkerBot Virtual Assistant. Unlike other chatbots, ParkerBot only answers with content from vetted sources like NASA websites,

so you know you can trust the results. I'll leave a link to that on this page of Planetary Radio as well, just in case you want to ask Parker Bott any of your burning solar questions. Now, let's check in with Dr. Bruce Betts, our chief scientist for What's Up. Hey, Bruce. Hi there, Sarah. The sun just blasted off a bunch of flares at the time that we're having this recording because we're nearing solar maximum right now. So things are getting weird. I mean, I guess you could phrase it that way. Yeah. It's certainly an active sun going

more active-er. I did have a question about this and I'm sure it's a very complicated answer. So we don't have to get like too deep into the weeds. But the thing that causes the aurora is that these charged particles from the sun end up getting kind of blasted towards the magnetic poles of our world because they follow those magnetic field lines. But during these major solar storms and things like that, we end up with aurora at way lower latitudes. Why is it that it doesn't just like brighten in the north? Why do we see it in other locations? Well, the answer is magnetic fields. It's like with the sun, everything on the sun can be

explained with the answer. It's because of magnetic fields. Boom, we're done. No, give more. Basically, so usually you've got particles coming and we've got solar wind all the time, but that doesn't do a lot. And then you get a solar storm belches out more material at one time, comes, hits the atmosphere, causes aurora, but it hits wherever it hits, the charged particles hit the magnetic field of the earth and they get directed poleward, as you stated. And so as you hit with more stuff, you kind of futz with the magnetic field and you expand the auroral oval, which is kind of the place where the particles hit the right part of the atmosphere coming down magnetic field lines.

And so that expands outwards, but it's all tied to having more of this stuff. But yeah, that was a really clear explanation, I think. Sorry. I've definitely seen those diagrams, though, of like material, charged material coming off of the sun, and then that interacting with the Earth's magnetic field and doing some serious disruption to it. Like, we're very lucky that we have such a strong magnetic dynamo to protect us because the sun is not messing around. No, it's not. And it does affect things. And that's why we want more and more solar storm monitoring because flares are the light show, basically, but they're often associated with these other things, particularly the CMEs,

coronal mass ejections. And they're like a big belch of material. And if it comes flying at the Earth, if you have enough, you start damaging potentially satellites, power grids on the surface. It gets gnarly. I mean, I think we all remember 1859, and that was some crazy, crazy stuff, man. Telegraph operators getting burned, things catching on fire, dogs living with cats. It was nuts because of the largest storm historically. So we are worried about those things. I wanted to point out that it does other weird stuff too. So as we reach solar,

head towards solar maximum, you have more of these particles. There's an interaction, not only with the magnetic field, but with the atmosphere of heating in the atmosphere, causing an expansion of the atmosphere. That led to the rapid end of LightSail 2 as the atmosphere came up to meet LightSail 2 more and more, and we were going through more atmosphere and being dragged down. And we actually, in fact, there on our website, some of the plots showing correlation between solar activity of this type and the rate at which we started dropping as we left solar minimum and headed off towards solar maximum. And we already were dropping some anyway, which we expected, but it led to the fiery death

of Lysil 2. Dun, dun, dun. RIP LightSail. But that means that you could actually potentially elongate the lifetime of a satellite by trying to launch it during a solar minimum. Yep, that is true, which is harder because you need a bigger rocket and more money, but you launch to higher orbits and you don't have this problem because you get away from the atmosphere it turns out even where we were at 700 kilometers above the earth there's still enough stuff that if you have a five kilogram spacecraft and a sail the size of a boxing ring it uh it it eventually drags that that puppy down you know what would make you feel better? Random space fact! I feel better already. I thought you would. As of now, May 2024,

279 people. What have they done, Sarah? What have they done? 279 people. I'm going to guess. Went to space? Went to the International Space Station. Whoa. 279 individual people. So some of them, many of them went multiple times. They've been from 22 countries, mostly, not surprisingly, from the U.S. at 165, followed by Russia with 59. And number three, anyone? Anyone? Japan with 11.

I was going to go Japan or Canada on that one. Yeah, no, that makes sense. Obviously, there have been a number of ESA astronauts, but they're already multiple countries, but one space agency equivalent. Gosh, that's so cool. All right. All right, everybody. cool. All right. All right, everybody go up there. Look, look, look, look, look up in the night sky and think about the variability of palm trees. Thank you and good night. Some of them are really tall and skinny and some are really big and white. It's wild. We've reached the end of this

episode of Planetary Radio, but we'll be back next week to celebrate Asteroid Day. It's the anniversary of the Tunguska blast. We've also got an update on the DART mission that smashed into asteroid Dimorphos. If you love the show, you can get Planetary Radio t-shirts at planetary.org.shop, along with lots of other cool spacey merchandise. Help others discover the passion, beauty, and joy of space science and exploration by leaving a review and a rating on platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Your feedback not only brightens our day, but helps other curious minds find their place in

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