the whisper instrument which stands for a wide field imager for solar probe is
an instrument that is an investigation that's on the Parker Solar Probe the
mission the solar probe, the concept of going close to the Sun which is what
this mission is was actually proposed in 1958 by the Space Studies Board right at
the formation of NASA
the Parker Solar Probe is a revolutionary mission that has been
sixty years in the making and it is going to go deep into the
heart of the Sun's corona that hazy atmosphere that we see during a total
solar eclipse and it's going to be worth zipping through there at breathtaking
speeds getting data that scientists have really been waiting for for more than 60
years to finally answer some of the mysteries of our corona and allow us to
be able to explain really how our star works we live in the atmosphere of the
Sun so when something happens on the Sun we will actually feel the effects here
at earth so if the Sun sneezes the earth will catch a cold anything that happens
on there is going to be felt here at the planet and so us being able to explain
what is going on in this critical region that we've never been able to sample
before means that Parker Solar Probe will finally be able to answer these
questions for us.
So the Parker Solar Probe really carries
all the instruments that we need to make these critical measurements and we do
have a full suite of instruments that are measuring particles they're gonna
tell us what's coming in the solar wind they're gonna measure all the fields
from magnetic the electric fields but we also have a very novel instrument that
is a white light imager and that is designed and built by the Naval Research
Lab who of course has a long history in providing optical instruments for NASA
and we're going to rely very much on this imager that is going to fly on the
Parker Solar Probe.
The whisper is a telescope or several telescopes that
that blocked the disk of the Sun that blocked the diffracted light actually
we're using the heat shield as the first stage in blocking the Sun but then light
gets scattered off the edge of that and we block those that diffract that
scattered light.
It's an unusual imager in that it's not
gonna take pictures of the Sun like we are used to seeing it's actually gonna
take images of the solar wind right in front of the spacecraft and so having
these images that tell us well this is what we're about to fly through are
going to make so much difference to our ability to unlock the secrets in our
data and so it's such an important instrument for really helping us to
understand what these measurements in this region we've never been to we don't
know quite what we're going to expect but it's going to be taking the images
that we need to better help us understand those data.
The problem for for
space weather and and the Navy is that what we're going what this mission is
going to be able to do is to pin down exactly what the structure close to the
Sun is the the overall structure we'll be able to image that but also there's
an experiment that will measure the strengths of the magnetic field and electric
fields and that that sort of thing the the structure of the plasma that were
that we're running through and those are key parameters in helping us to better
predict better model the propagation of the solar wind through through this huge
region... one hundred million miles between the Sun and Earth.
One of the results
that could possibly come from Parker Solar Probe that I'm most excited about
is nothing at all and I mean that literally it's from a conversation with
Dr. Russ Howard early on in the mission he explained to me that very close to
the Sun there is a lot of dust it's a very dusty place a lot of star dust that
we will be flying through but people have theorized that very close to the
Sun there's actually a dust-free region but of course we can't see it from here
because we're always looking through the dust but with the orbit of Parker Solar
Probe and having this whisper imager from NRL we'll be able to image close
enough to the Sun to hopefully see nothing at all and finally prove that
this dust free region is really there.
What we're going to achieve is just
absolutely amazing it's just all I can say is stay tuned because you're we're
going to see stuff that we just have never imagined I'm sure