And you tried to explain it to someone else, and they just didn't believe you.

This is the story about a man named Eugene Parker who in 1958 wrote a paper about solar winds.

NASA has named about 20 spacecraft after distinguished researchers.

However, NASA has never named a spacecraft after researcher during their lifetime.

It is my great honor.

A few days before you're not 90th birthday, Jean to announce that we're renaming the solar probe plus spacecraft to be known from now on as the Parker Solar probe.

Congratulations.

I wrote my speech down here.

I'm certainly greatly honored to be associate ID with such a heroic scientific space mission by heroic, of course.

I'm referring to the temperature.

A thermal radiation from the sun.

Every human that has ever lived has looked at the sun and thought about it.

And this is mankind's best effort to understand it.

It is time for us to go to Kennedy and ask hard questions.

Okay, we made it.

So, uh, there is a NASA press side over here.

We're gonna go in there and see if we can find the scientists.

So This is the press building and all these different stations.

Air said it with people that are involved in the launch and science way.

Just go walk up and ask questions.

You stay right here.

I mean, this is super super informal.

Excellent, destined.

And Angela, you work with Mr Parker.

So I'm the physical sciences division, Dean at the University of Chicago.

So now I'm sort of responsible for all the physical sciences in Chicago.

But my history in the nineties was a researcher much junior than Gene.

And now I'm a senior researcher.

And he is now happy to be watching a launch of the the probe.

The Parker Solar Probe.

This is looked after him.

His life's work right?

It's his life's work, is incredibly humbled and just loves physics.

He loves astrophysics and loves to understand the universe by sitting down writing equations, trying to understand how the physics and the cosmos works.

That stuff we know on Earth, how does it get translated out there and hey would do that from it on early age.

And then when he came to the ears of Chicago, he was very puzzled by what was going on with you know, for example, comet tails and other issues with the solar system as a whole and sat down and wrote the equations that we call hydrodynamic equations for what would look like this plasma from the sun all the way to the edge of the solar system.

And what he found was that there would be the solar wind.

And he had a very hard time publishing that paper because people didn't believe it.

People thought, No way.

There is no wind, supersonic speeds coming from the sun all the way to the earth.

There's nothing between the sun and the earth.

It's really, you know, just empty space.

And there shouldn't be any problem flying out there.

For example.

It turns out he was right, and those who were very skeptical about him, what made him see it like what made him think it was there.

It was physics, you know.

So people had the equations that explained the universe, right, so people would make models and they assume there was nothing.

So if you assume there's nothing between the sun, the earth, then you know your solution will tell you zero.

But if you look a little deeper and say, Well, wait a minute.

Could there be something?

Uh, he would, which is what he did.

And he found, Yes, there is this whole solar wind and nobody believed him.

So he had a hard time publishing.

This is 1958 by 1962.

He got a bit lucky compared to many theorists because his theory was proved four years later.

And that's what Marina to did very precisely on its way to Venus and made it very clear that that's the solar wind.

Parker solar probe really was, You know, decades of work by many, many scientists Getting close to the sun is no piece of cake.

Right?

So the sun is very hot.

The corona is even hotter.

So it's an amazing design.

The most impressive technological jump was the solar, the shield.

Before we go talk to the people that actually built the Parker solar probe, my daughter and I thought I'd be really fun to make a model version for herself.

So we went to the craft room and made some awesomeness be jealous.

After talking to Angela, I kind of think of the spacecraft now like a shield on a Roman soldier, right?

The enemy is the solar radiation.

And no matter where the spacecraft is, it is always pointing that shield towards the sun to protect it from the enemy, which is, you know, the thermal loading that would kill this thing in 10 seconds.

As a matter of fact, anyway, there's two things that to be developed in order for this mission to happen.

The 1st 1 of these high temperature solar panels.

And the 2nd 1 is the shield itself.

So they learn about that.

Let's go talk to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.

This is Philippe from Johns Hopkins, right?

Yep.

Over mechanical, that beauty lead mechanical for the Parker solar probe.

So this is a big day for you, Right?

Says this is a day that for me has been for years in the making.

For most of the team at Johns Hopkins.

10 years in the making, real and for for the space community.

For NASA, this was a mission that was proposed in 1958.

Really?

So there's people that have been waiting for this for 60 years, So you got on right at the tailing, Got right on.

I'm talking about.

I think the timing was perfect.

Do you call it the Sun Shield or the So we call it the thermal protection system.

The TPS, Yeah.

Um, and it's it's really what's letting us fly this mission.

That's the reason why we haven't pointed in 60 years because we had come up with the right materials to do it.

So the shield is a carbon carbon foam san.

It's between two carbon carbon reinforced panels.

When we're close to the sun, wherever in their last three orbits of the close approach, the top of the shield will see 1300 degrees Celsius.

It's about 11 centimeters stick.

When you get to the bottom, you're at 300 degrees Celsius.

So do you have radiators?

So what we do, but the radiators air for the solar rays?

Um, one of the really interesting challenges.

And this was figuring out how to power the spacecraft because we're going close to the sun, right?

And so you have all of the solar flux you could ever want in the world, but the ones you could melt him, right?

So the moment you get in your way out there, it's gone.

Um, and that's another of the key enabling things we've done is the's.

A raise instead of being built on like a honey comb panel, like usual satellite arrays are, we've built them on a titanium plant, has micro channels flowing through it, and it's not fancy cool.

It's just an eyes water from a tank about this big inside the spacecraft that circulates here through the arrays comes up to these two conical surfaces, and those are radiators.

And so that takes all the heat from the arrays and picks it out to deep space.

So the Sun Shield is hyper important.

So here's a question I have if we're eight light minutes away from Earth and anything that gets exposed in the back here to direct sunlight gets killed instantly.

How do we keep this thing pointing?

Because you can't get a signal there and back quick enough, and the answer is fascinating.

On the back of the spacecraft.

They're these.

The light sensors, and if you think about it as you're pointing up there as you start to tilt off access to start to expose things, those the light sensors get exposed first.

You see that way up there right.

Well, when that happens, the reaction wheels on the spacecraft itself.

They use those to realign to make sure that they're pointed directly at the sun, which is fascinating.

I think it's a really neat design feature.

Next thing, this is called a Faraday Cup.

Let's see if we can figure out how that works.

I'm destined.

Tony Tony case in your You with I'm with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

So we're part of the Smithsonian, which is a lot of museums and a lot of research centers.

And the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory is affiliated with Harvard, up at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

And so this is the instrument that's poking out from behind the thermal protection system.

This is it.

So this is, Ah, qualification bottle.

We used it to test before we built the actual version that's on the spacecraft.

But this is a 1 to 1 copy, exact size, exact same materials and everything.

So what's the mesh right here?

So that's a tungsten.

A fine tungsten grid, 90% transparent in the particles flow through that.

It's tungsten because it has the highest melting point.

Yep, and it's the hottest portion of the instrument right at the center of that grid gets up to a 3000 degrees Fahrenheit.

And then behind the grid you can see in the front is another grid that we put it, 6000 volts that creates an electric field.

The charged particles then reflected out because of that electric field, or they make it through.

If they have a high enough speed and then you're detecting those and then we detect them in the very back, there's a piece of metal the mobile to see here.

But these four wires connect to that piece of metal.

And so, as the charged particles impact the metal, they deposit their charge.

And we measure that as a current that's coming out through those wires.

So on these wires right here, Yeah.

So this is high voltage going up that drives the high voltage grid, and then the wires inside here are carrying the signal coming back.

So you're driving the high voltage grid to guide what's coming in.

We can select the speed of particles that we want to measure by putting a certain voltage on the grid.

So it is your wire made out of copper.

It's made out of niobium.

What niobium.

Yeah, copper would melt.

It's way too hot for copper.

Okay, so it's made out of niobium.

So how do you insulate something like that?

So it's insulated by, uh, little sapphire beads.

So it's niobium on the outside here.

And then sapphire beads.

What?

And then that niobium wire runs through each of those little bits of sapphire and through these little corners where there's middle elbows made of sapphire.

And in that way, the center conductor is insulated from the outer conductor.

So this is like So basically, you've got a bunch of un obtaining him and fantastic Lloyd, and you put them together and made a C R T tube.

That's way more fancy that Yeah, no, I mean, think of it as a like a vacuum tube.

That's basically what it is.

It operates in vacuum, so you don't have to enclose it in glass on, so that's pretty much what it is.

And you can select the speed of particles that are coming in with a voltage and and then and regulate the current that you end up with on your collector plates.

In the ultimate goal of this device, which is one of the main main pieces of science on the spacecraft, is to count neutrinos.

What?

Is that the word?

No, A mechanical engineer.

I understand wrenches.

So this is think of it as like what the sun is made of.

Okay, there are a lot of neutrinos coming from the sun, but it's made of mostly hydrogen and helium, the bulk constituents of the universe and of the son.

Uh and so the hydrogen comes out as ionized hydrogen or just protons, and the helium comes out as typically doubly ionized helium.

So typically, it would have to electrons both of those air stripped off.

We call those outfit particles if you're talking about radiation.

And those are the two main constituents of the solar wind, along with electrons, and we measure all of those.

So you're measuring flux.

Yes, So you're measuring, like as you get closer and closer to the sun, you're going to be able to understand the density of solar when not corona mass ejections, cause I'm saying that would kill you.

If that happens, we'll mow.

Measure those bull.

Yep.

So, bull, you're not gonna be able to take a Corona man.

Subjection to the face, right to the face.

So, yeah.

So?

So.

The cool thing about Corona mass ejections is it's basically the same plasma that is there all the time.

It's just ejected in slightly more dense form and faster are you talking about?

I can see it.

What?

You're saying You can see the solar wind, too.

Okay.

In a communal mass ejection.

Parker Solar probe.

Fastest man made object ever decadesworth of science, engineering, miracles all over the place.

When you dig into the hardware, this is a fascinating mission.

I love it.

The thing that makes this the fastest man made object in history is the Delta four.

Heavy in the next video is me walking up to the Delta four heavy pad with Tori Bruno, the CEO of the company that made it you l a.