have you ever figured something else 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 your 90th birthday gene
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
associated with such a heroic scientific
space mission by heroic of course I'm
referring to the temperature the 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 ok we made it so there is a
NASA press site over here we're gonna go
in there and see if we can find a
scientist so this is the press building
and all these different stations are set
up with people that are involved in the
launch and the science and we walk up
and ask questions pretty cool
go stare right here I mean this is super
super informal excellent and Destin and
Anjali 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 90s was a researcher much junior
than Jean and now I'm you know a senior
researcher and he is now happy to be
watching a launch of the probe the
Parker Solar Probe this is named after
him his life's work right it's his
life's work he's 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 in the cosmos works the
stuff we know on earth how does it get
translated out there and he would do
that from an early age and then when he
came to the earth of Chicago he was very
puzzled by what was going on with you
know for example Comet tail's 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 turns out he was
right and those who were very skeptical
about him I thought 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 assumed there was nothing so if you
assume there's nothing between the Sun
and the earth then you know your
solution will tell you zero but if you
look a little deeper and you say well
wait a minute could there be something
he would which is what he did and he
found yes there is this whole solar wind
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 proof
four years later and that's what Marino
two did very precisely on its way to
Venus and made it very clear that that's
the solar wind the 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 the solar the shield before we go
talk to the people that actually built
the Parker Solar Probe my daughter and I
thought it'd be really fun to make a
model version for ourselves so we went
to the craft room and made some
Awesomeness be jealous so after talking
to Angela I kind of think of a
spacecraft now like a shield on a Roman
sold
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 had to be developed in order
for this mission to happen the first one
of these high temperature solar panels
and the second one is the shield itself
so to 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 races this is a day that
for me has been for years in the making
from those two the team at Johns Hopkins
10 years in the making really 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 tail end got it right on
I'm talking about I think the timing was
perfect you call it the Sun shield or
they so we call it the thermal
protection system the TPS yeah and it's
it's really what's letting us fly this
mission it's the reason why we haven't
pointed in 60 years because we can't
come up with the right materials to do
it
so the shield is a carbon carbon foam
Santas between two carbon carbon
reinforced panels when we're close to
the Sun wherever in our last three
orbits of the close approached the top
of the shield will see 1,300 degrees
Celsius it's about 11 centimeters thick
and when you get to the bottom you're at
300 degrees Celsius so do you have
radiators so we do but the radiators are
for the solar arrays one of the really
interesting challenges in 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 can melt them right so
the moment you get an array out there
it's gone and that's another of the key
enabling things we've done is these
arrays instead of being built on like a
honeycomb panel like usual satellite
arrays are we've built them on a
titanium platinum micro channels flowing
through it and it's not fancy cool it's
just the ionized 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 our radiators and so that
takes all the heat from the arrays and
picks it out the deep space so the
sunshield is hyper important so here's a
question I have if we are 8 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 there are these the light
sensors and if you think about it as
you're pointing up there as you start to
tilt off axis to start to expose things
those little 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
Destin Tony Tony case in and who are 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 a
qualification model we used it to test
before we built the actual version
that's on the spacecraft so I wanted one
but this is a one-to-one 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 and the particles flow
through that it is tungsten because it
has the highest melting point yep and
it's the hottest portion of the
instrument right at the center that grid
gets up to a 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit
and then behind the grid you can see in
the front is another grid that we put at
6,000 volts
that creates an electric field the
charged particles then get 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 that
you won't be able 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 yep 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 a little sapphire beads so
it's not be amaan the outside here and
then sapphire beads what and then the
niobium wire runs through each of those
little bits of sapphire and through
these little corners where there's
little elbows made of sapphire and in
that way the center conductor is
insulated from the outer conductor so
this is like so basically you get a
bunch of unobtainium and fantastical
Lloyd and you put them together and made
it a CRT tube that's way more fancy than
that ya know I mean think of it as a
like a vacuum tube that's basically what
it is and it operates in vacuum so you
don't have to enclose it in glass and 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 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 those
are the bulk constituents of the
universe and of the Sun and so the 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 two electrons
both of those are stripped off we call
those alpha 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
wind not coronal mass ejections because
I'm assuming that
kill you if that happen no well mo
measure those bull yep
so bull you're not gonna be able to
you're to take a coronal mass ejection
to the face right to the face so yeah so
the so the cool thing about coronal 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 what are you talking
about I can see it what you see is you
can see the solar wind - okay in a
coronal mass ejection Parker Solar Probe
fastest man-made object ever decade's
worth 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 for heavy and the next video
is me walking up to the delta 4 heavy
pad with Torrey Bruno the CEO of the
company that made at ula and just
talking to him about the rocket it is
fascinating I mean like you talk about
access like it's on the pad it's insane
please check that video out it's amazing
if you want to see the rest of these
interviews like in their entirety that's
over on the second channel and this next
thing you're about to watch is after
we'd stayed up for 24 hours after launch
we've been driving for many hours and
we've been up for 24 hours how's that
feel Trent we're almost here 'z the deal
I want to say thank you to the sponsor
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your thing that would be a big help also
this this
experience was amazing and it's really
hard to compress all this into one video
so I'm just now going to do it
there's too much good stuff here we're
gonna make another video I mean Torre
Bruno showed us around the top of the
MST and it's just amazing right we got
to talk
technical with the man who's an actual
rocket scientist on top of the tower
next to his rocket please consider
subscribing to smarter every day if you
don't mind we're almost home and we're
trying to do it safely
so I'm Destin you're getting smarter
every day have a good one bye