A renewed space race to put human boots back on the Moon to set up a base might be the talk of the town at the moment, but this year NASA has another historic mission planned. Their Parker Solar Probe, which launched in 2018, is set to skim past the Sun 7-times closer than any human made device ever has.
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00:00 [Music]
00:04 A renewed space race to put human boots back on the moon to set up a base
00:07 might be the talk of the town at the moment.
00:09 But this year NASA has another historic mission planned.
00:12 The Parker Solar Probe, which launched in 2018,
00:15 is set to skim past the sun seven times closer than any human-made device ever has,
00:20 withstanding some of the most extreme heat and radiation known to man.
00:24 The whole thing helps to give us a better understanding of the sun's corona,
00:27 or its outermost atmosphere.
00:29 This will help us better understand that region's coronal mass ejections,
00:32 or giant solar storms that send charged particles out into space.
00:36 This is important as those very particles can cause geomagnetic storms on Earth,
00:40 events of increasing danger for humanity as our reliance on technology continues to grow.
00:45 Scientists and astronomers also don't know what to expect as they gather this data,
00:49 with one of the projects scientists saying,
00:51 "This will be a monumental achievement for all humanity.
00:54 This is equivalent to the moon landing in 1969."
00:58 The researchers say they're hoping to collect wave data
01:00 that will help us better understand the process as the sun goes through,
01:03 and might finally put to rest certain theories astronomers have been arguing about for years.
01:09 (upbeat music)
01:11 (upbeat music)