Regular Monthly Members/Society night, first** Monday of each month.
**IMPORTANT: From 2023 the Regular Monthly Members/Society night will be the SECOND Monday of the Month.

For Hamilton Astronomical Society members only.

This Month: Speaker - Professor Sean Oughton.

NASA’S MISSION TO TOUCH THE SUN: THE PARKER SOLAR PROBE.

The Sun's outer atmosphere (the corona) has a temperature of about a million degrees Celsius. This has been known since the 1940s, but how it gets to be that hot is still not understood, although the Sun's magnetic field is believed to play a pivotal role. The NASA spacecraft mission Parker Solar Probe (PSP) was launched in 2018 to try to improve understanding of this 'coronal heating problem' (along with some other objectives). PSP was designed to get within the corona, where the physics is somewhat different compared to the regions above the corona. PSP has been closer to the Sun than any other spacecraft and has now dipped in and out of the actual corona a few times. Over the next few years, it will get even closer. This talk will discuss the PSP mission and its objectives, and talk about what directly measuring the speed, density, and magnetic field in the corona have taught us.

NOTES

• Masks to be worn.