Explanation:
Everybody sees the Sun. Nobody's been there.
Starting in 2018 though, NASA
launched the robotic
Parker Solar Probe (PSP) to
investigate
regions near to the Sun for the first time.
The PSP's looping
orbit
brings it yet closer to the Sun
each time around -- every few months.
The featured time-lapse video
shows the view looking sideways from
behind PSP's Sun
shield during its first approach to the Sun a year ago -- to about half the orbit
of
Mercury.
The PSP's
Wide Field Imager for Solar Probe
(WISPR)
cameras took the images over nine days,
but they are digitally compressed here into about 14 seconds.
The waving
solar corona is visible on the far left,
with stars, planets, and even the central band of our
Milky Way Galaxy streaming by in the background as the
PSP orbits the Sun.
PSP
has found the solar neighborhood to be
surprisingly complex and to include
switchbacks --
times when the
Sun's magnetic field briefly reverses itself.
The Sun is not only Earth's dominant
energy source, its variable
solar wind compresses Earth's atmosphere,
triggers auroras, affects power grids, and can even
damage
orbiting communication satellites.
