One of many devices on NASA’s Parker Photo voltaic Probe powered down unexpectedly final weekend, however do not panic — the mission workforce expects it to return again on-line quickly.
The sun-studying spacecraft switched off its Energetic Particle Instrument-Hello (EPI-Hello) on Feb. 12, whereas a software program patch was being uploaded to it, NASA officers defined in a short Parker Solar Probe replace on Friday (Feb. 17).
“An anomaly evaluate board decided the instrument was turned on prematurely earlier than the brand new patch was utterly loaded,” the update states (opens in new tab).
“The instrument will stay off for a number of weeks because the geometry between the probe, the sun and solar radio frequency interference will stop a superb uplink,” it continues. “The EPI-Hello is predicted to return to regular operations after this blackout interval, earlier than the spacecraft begins its fifteenth shut encounter with the sun on March 12.”
The Parker Photo voltaic Probe stays wholesome total, NASA officers added within the replace.
Associated: What’s inside the sun? A star tour from the inside out
The Parker Photo voltaic Probe launched atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket in August 2018 on a $1.5 billion mission to check the sun like by no means earlier than.
Mission scientists goal to unravel a number of solar mysteries, chief amongst them why the sun’s outer ambiance, or corona, is a lot hotter than its floor and the way the solar wind — the stream of charged particles flowing continuously from the sun — reaches its unimaginable velocities.
The Parker Photo voltaic Probe gathers most of its information throughout daring super-close flybys of the sun, which expose the spacecraft to scorching temperatures and speed up it to super speeds. (Photo voltaic gravity is a robust factor.)
These flybys happen roughly as soon as each 5 months. The following one, the fifteenth of the mission to this point, will peak on March 17 (opens in new tab), when the probe zooms simply 5.3 million miles (8.5 million kilometers) above the sun’s floor.
As its identify suggests, EPI-Hello is designed to measure high-energy solar particles. It is one in all two particle detectors, together with EPI-Lo, that make up the spacecraft’s Built-in Science Investigation of the Solar instrument.
The Parker Photo voltaic Probe is provided with three different instrument suites as effectively — the Fields Experiment, the Extensive-field Imager for Photo voltaic Probe (WISPR) and the Photo voltaic Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons investigation, or SWEAP.
Mike Wall is the writer of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a ebook in regards to the seek for alien life. Observe him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Observe us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).
