A NASA probe has traveled into a region where the temperature is 2 million degrees-Fahrenheit.
The star's corona is the farthest away from the ground. NASA says that the closest thing to the fiery orb has been at 6.5 million miles from the sun.
It was an engineering feat to build instruments that could survive the heat. How did they do it without turning Parker into a villain?
Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics made and monitored one of the tools on the craft. The equipment sits outside of the heat shield and catches some of the sun's activity.
At one point on April 28, he entered the corona three times and took samples. The findings from the event were published last week.
Anthony Case, the center's instrument scientist, said that the cup was so hot it glowed red-orange. That is comparable to volcanic lava. It never reached the millions of degrees of the environment.
Case said the key is understanding the difference between temperature and heat. The amount of heat and temperature are related.
A 100 degree day feels hot on the skin of people because a lot of the air in the air is hot.
You can feel how hot they are. He said that it's how we sense temperature. There are very few particles in space. Even though it's a million degrees, there are billions of times less particles in the air than on Earth.
The less space there is, the less energy and heat can be transferred. The cup faces the sun, which can heat it up.
Scientists narrowed their options to a small portion of the periodic table. The materials used in the device have high melting points. It can tolerate up to 6,192 degrees.
I want to go to Disney World the rest of the way and meet Mickey Mouse.
The team worked on the cup for eight years. Scientists used thousands of mirrors to reflect sunlight and focus it into a tiny area to test materials under superheated conditions at a facility in the Pyrenees Mountains of France.
Case recalled a failed test involving an oven. The metal was gone after baking.
He said that the only thing they could see was a shadow of the twisted wire that had left a deposit on the metal next to it. We didn't use that material anymore.
Scientists say that if the cup gets too hot, it won't melt. When exposed to the vacuum of space, dry ice can go from a solid to steam. Sublimating is a natural process.
Case said that it disappears.
NASA says a 4.5-inch thick heat shield protects the other instruments and electronics from the sun's harmful rays. The solar panels that power the probe have a cooling system that has a higher boiling point than normal.
The mission of the man is to learn how the sun and corona work. Scientists are studying solar wind. The probe has shown that some magnetic zigzags in the wind come from the sun's surface. Understanding the origins of the solar wind could help keep astronauts and satellites safe.
Scientists don't know how to forecast space weather, which can disrupt power grids, telecommunications and gps systems. A solar flare in March 1989 caused a 12-hour power outage in Quebec, Canada. Radio Free Europe's radio signals were jammed.
During the April flyby, it was 90 to 98% of the distance from Earth to the star. The plan is to come within 3.8 million miles of the surface.
The brief visit didn't give scientists much insight into the rides.
Stevens considers himself the guy at the front of the line for Space Mountain as he gets the first look at the cup.
He wants to go to Disney World and meet Mickey Mouse. We were on the doorstep.
