 That way you can see what they turn into. Well, I see that it's six o'clock and so let's get started. So hello everyone and welcome to the August NASA Night Sky Network member webinar. We're hosting tonight's webinar from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and San Francisco, California and points elsewhere distributed around the country. We're very excited to have our guest speaker this evening, Dr. Kelly Couric from NASA Headquarters. Welcome to everyone joining us on the YouTube live stream. We're very happy to have you with us. These webinars are monthly events for members of the NASA Night Sky Network. For more information about the NASA Night Sky Network and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, check out the links in the chat that we'll put in here momentarily. Before we introduce Kelly, here's Dave Prosper with just a few announcements. You're still muted, Dave. Thank you. That's what happens when you put your notes up in front of the part that sells you to mute. Anyway, hi everyone. I'll keep it quicker now. First, you can become a NASA partner Eclipse Ambassador. So make a difference in your community while celebrating solar science. A little bit like we're doing tonight. You can apply to become an official NASA partner Eclipse Ambassador. And for the upcoming annual in 2023 and 2024 total solar eclipse is crossing the United States and parts of North America. So there's a partnership between that NASA is partnering amateur astronomers with undergraduate students to engage around 500 underserved communities that are off the central path of the eclipses, which will this training will occur both before and between these events. And you can help a mentor a local undergraduate student and you train together with others across the country in a three week virtual workshop and you'll learn new tools and techniques for explaining eclipses and inspiring awe and then engage your underserved audiences with outreach. And you will of course receive a generous toolkit full of materials to enhance your outreach, which of course will include hundreds of safe solar viewing glasses and lots of hands-on activities. And you'll also be connected with local organizations that will help you connect with folks and recognize your commitment to and we'll also recognize your public astronomy engagement with special badge and certificates. We'll be also supported by us at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific who are committed to helping everyone enjoy the wonder and science of solar eclipses everywhere. You can apply at eclipse ambassadors.org. So do that, it'll be very fun. And just in case you're wondering, yeah, once you train everyone and introduce the science, if you do want to go look at the eclipse afterwards, you certainly can. Some folks might have had a little bit of confusion. And the other little bit I just wanna say is if, like me, you've also received a whole bunch of UFO reports over the weekend, there was another Starlink launch. So you can just tell people that was a Starlink launch, send them a link to your favorite or at least favorite picture of them and be on their way. And that's really all there is. There's lots more of course, but let's get started. Back to y'all everyone. All right, thanks, Dave. For those of you on Zoom, you can find the chat window and the Q&A window at the bottom edge of your Zoom window on your desktop. Please feel free to greet each other in the chat window, making sure that you select everyone in that little button. There's a little pull down menu and so select everyone. If you don't, it's just gonna, the only people that are gonna see your greetings are the four of us that are on screen. Also, you can let us know in the chat if you're having any technical difficulties. You can also send us an email at nightskyinfo at astrosociety.org. If you have a question for Dr. Cork, you can put that into the Q&A window. That really helps us to keep track of all your questions and also whether we've answered them or not. So I'm gonna go ahead and hit record again here. Hey, welcome to the August webinar of the NASA Night Sky Network. This month we welcome Dr. Kelly Cork to our webinar. Dr. Cork is a scientist in the Helio Physics Division at NASA headquarters where she works with a host of NASA missions and works on science, activation and education. Over 20 years working with NASA missions at various institutions or research has ranged from the sun's coronal mass ejections to the remnant shock waves from the supernovae. Hopefully they're not tube related. So that's, you know, would be a good thing to explore is the relationship between supernovae shock waves and coronal mass ejections. I'm sure that there's a relationship there someplace. But Kelly has been involved in building spaceflight hardware, working on a sounding rocket. And most recently Colid and East Instrument Suite on board NASA's Parker Solar Probe mission. So please welcome Dr. Kelly Cork. Thank you, thank you for that kind introduction. And I do always start off with the fact that, yes, the sun will not go supernovae. So that was a comparative basic physics study, not an indication of anything that's wrong with the sun. So the sun will not go supernovae. Everyone is safe, we're good. So again, my name is Kelly Cork and I'm gonna chat today about what's up with the sun? Recent results from NASA's Parker Solar Probe. And a little bit about me first is this is the mirrors that were used in the high sea rocket. So me in the clean room, a little bit about my job. It's varied over the years and sometimes you suit up in a bunny suit and are inspecting mirrors. And again, my mirrors look a little different, right? They don't quite look like the mirrors that you see in a bathroom or that maybe you have in your car visor. These are specifically for things in the ultraviolet, extreme ultraviolet. So the wavelength of light reflect a little bit differently. So it's not quite that silver that you normally see in a mirror. So that's a little bit of time in the lab, a little bit of time out in the desert in White Sands, New Mexico in order to launch that high sea rocket. So that optic is now that mirror is now up there that gold plated or gold colored. It's not gold plated, but gold colored telescope up there. And that was launched in 2012 as the highest resolution images at the time of the sun's corona and really studying that very hot region of the sun. At other parts of my job, I had worked on the Hinode telescope which is the X-ray telescope that's down here on this and the artist rendition is pointed the wrong way, not towards the sun, but that studied X-rays. So you actually skip the photons in like you would skip a stone on a lake because they're so high energy they would otherwise just go right through much like when you get an X-ray of your hand. So that was another type of telescope I worked with. I worked with Hubble data. So taking pictures of those far away stars that explode and what remnants they leave over left that they leave behind are things that I studied. Use the Chandra X-ray telescope to also study those exploding stars and the Solar Dynamics Observatory which are these four telescopes the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly which take a picture of the sun every 10 seconds and end up doing 1.7 terabytes of data a day which is the equivalent to half a million YouTube or iTunes songs a day. And so this is a lot of data. It's geosync orbit over New Mexico and constantly downloading that and making sure to take pictures of the sun and to really understand it. And then one of my favorite parts of the job is international collaboration. So this is a picture I think in Dublin of Ireland of a variety of folks that I worked with on various missions. I think this is one of the Hanoi meetings. So again, a wonderful part of my job is really the international flavor that I've met people all over the world and all these scientists are working for a common good to really understand the sun and how it relates to the earth. And in my spare time, really I adore the beach. I also happen to teach yoga. So being healthy and exercising is a large part of my life as well as cupcakes are a very large part of my life. I have a definite sweet tooth and you might see an appearance today of my cat as she is a pandemic cat and she is not used to me going to work all these days. So being back home, she might do a visit. And so that's a little bit about me. And now back to the sun. The sun gives us so many amazing things like those warm beaches that I'm so fond of. It makes the earth the right temperature for us to really survive and thrive here. It's a comfortable temperature in most places and allows us to have liquid water which is very important for considering more made up 70% of water. It's very important for us to have liquid water. The sun also provides us food. So without the sun, there is no base of the base of the food chain in terms of plants and the food that either the food that food eats or the food that we eat to nourish ourselves and to enable us to do all of the amazing things humans do. The sun also entertains us and gives us these beautiful spectacles such as the aurora. Especially as we're going towards silver maximum there are more and more of these events. So this is when energetic particles shoot off the sun and interact with the earth's magnetic field that drag them through the atmosphere. And they excite the oxygen or nitrogen in the atmosphere that's in our makeup or atmosphere. And then those atoms glow different colors or red or green or white or blue based on the composition of that or what's what the gas in the area is made up of. And so the sun also provides these just absolutely beautiful breathtaking displays like displays. And again, as we go through this maximum the sun goes through cycles. It goes through a time where it's not so active. Maybe it throws off one or two of these events a week to a time where it does one to three to five of these a day. So that's an 11 year cycle and we are on the ramp up for one of those cycles right now. So if we were to picture the sun and again, we never look at the sun with unprotected eyes but if you can do it safely with a solar viewing filter or telescope is that we would see a relatively yellow surface in with our own eyes through that filter but yet we also see these there is seemingly marks on the sun and these spots or the sun spots are concentrated magnetic fields that happen on the sun and these are areas where then great activity grow from them. So when I'm saying that the sun is getting more active it's going to have more and more of these spots more and more of this magnetic energy building up so that it will interact with each other and create space weather. And sunspots aren't a new thing. In 11, 11, 28 common era a monk actually recorded that there were sunspots on the sun's disk by using a viewing technique was able to actually say there was something on the disk these sunspots were there and there have been other records as well previous to this through either a fog or a haze and again not recommended to do this viewing but you could look at the sun and see spots and differences and it has been recorded throughout history. And a very beautiful image from Langley drew these sunspots. So you can see there's this speckled pattern which to me looks like bubbling of a boiling pot of water. There's also we were talking earlier about the spaghetti something that looks kind of like spaghetti coming into the darker areas where again the magnetic field is controlling the gas of the sun and guiding it with the magnetic strength along magnetic field lines. And this is again just one single part of the sun it's not the entire sun these are just the spots that have been studied for their magnetic properties. The video that you see here is a way to look at when that those magnetic fields and plasma actually lead the sun. So you're seeing those stream out. The circle in the center is the size of the sun the blue dot around it the larger blue circle is an occultor. So we're blocking out the brightest parts of the sun so that we can see the very faint the million times fainter things that are coming off of the sun. And in the background you do see stars because you can see a star pattern in the back because again you're blocking out most of the light from the sun. And through this you're able to see many things. Let me see if I can play it again. You'll see a lot of material blow off and those are coronal mass ejection so that we made reference to the spaghetti and these are kind of the meatballs of the bigger mass of the sun. It is equivalent to the weight of 80 million school buses traveling at millions of miles an hour out throughout the heliosphere. The heliosphere is everything that the sun interacts with and its magnetic field kind of protects it much like our Earth's magnetosphere. And so these things are really again they go from about once a week during the minimum to three to five times a day during maximum so very active and something that we need to take into account as we become more space faring. So now looking at the size of these coronal mass ejections here's an approximate size of the Earth. Again the Earth is much further away than where it is currently in this picture but you can just get a sense of the scale of this is the beginning of a coronal mass ejection and that's how big the Earth is. So it is actually very, it's a very large phenomenon and sometimes we only see part of it because it is such so large compared to the Earth. And again you'll see what's interesting is these are now images from the Solar Genetics Observatory that look an awful lot like the Langley images with the roiling board boiling the spaghetti like hair that is covering the sun and the surface of the sun and that's all the magnetic field the plasma being funneled along the magnetic fields that exist on the sun. So we wanted to go explore this up close and Parker Solar Probe has been 60 years in the making and we're going because number one we are explorers and just being curious and being able to go to each place in the solar system the Simpson Committee actually the Space Studies Board in 1958 that also formed NASA said that we should go to the sun and to every planet in the solar system. And just before Parker happened we had hit all the other planets we just needed to get to the sun. So it was kind of the last thing and part of that is just the evolution of the technology to get there wasn't around in 1958. Some of the cameras, some of the carbon-carbon heat shield fiber heat shield was not available. Water cooling radiators were probably there but some of the solar panel technology was not there. So all of those things had to come along and come together in order to have a mission that was able to technologically to technologically get the science that we need. We're also going because of the practical matter of living with a star. As I was talking about all of those coronal mass ejections those energetic particles also that you saw coming to make the aurora, those things can affect airlines, they can affect satellites, your cell phone, GPS so all of those things really matter and trying to really understand how to live with a star is important. And the next part is also scientific curiosity as we have the closest plasma laboratory, the closest star to us is the sun and so it is great to get up close and just really start addressing some scientific questions that we really can't do when the rest of the stars that are very, very far away. So looking again at the space weather drivers especially with the larger flares there's normally a coronal mass ejection associated with it. So flares are a violent reorganization of all those magnetic fields. So going from these beautiful loops to them smashing together and cataclysmically reorganizing themselves AKA exploding and pushing out a lot of energetic particles that again can come down and make aurora affect spacewalks or things like that. And it can also again shoot out the coronal mass ejections the biggest of the flares are normally correlated with that. And those then coronal mass ejections again can come and bring with them some of that energy that could affect the technology at Earth. And when we have energetic electrons they could damage electrons, spacecraft electronics they can also cause changes in the ionosphere. So one of the layers of our Earth's atmosphere where we normally use to bounce off communication signals. And when we can't do that when the ionosphere currents and it gets kind of jumbled by all of the space weather activity it's hard to get a GPS to work. You can't navigate easily. They can also induce geomagnetic currents in power systems. So when there are the long transmission lines those can become overloaded. And if they can't come over loaded you can blow transformers and basically take down some of the power grid which especially in our technologically based life today is something that we just it would be catastrophic in terms of not having the cell phones but very quickly if you don't have electricity for a long time there's also things such as life support from pumping water stations all those other things are also affected if we do not have electricity flowing. And there's also effects on pilots flying pilots and crew and folks flying over poles when these things happen. So that's another time where we need to be able to tell what the sun is doing when it's gonna do it because we can mitigate all of these issues if we know that it's going to happen and we know ahead of time. So going back to that scientific curiosity is the sun is mysterious and it does at least two weird things it does a lot of weird things but that at least two weird things that we're trying to figure out. So first of all the sun is somewhat like a campfire in the center of the sun there is the energy or basically the burning logs which would be equivalent to the nuclear fusion that's happening in the core of the sun when we're smashing atoms together and giving off a lot of heat. So that's that fuel that's creating a campfire so it's super warm. And on earth when we have this campfire we know that if we walk away from it or even a fireplace in a home we know when we walk away from it it gets colder and as you go out of the sun's layers away from that core it does get cooler at that yellow surface that you see is much cooler than the core. However, as we keep going out the atmosphere then gets warmer. So it's this weird thing where you have around 16 million degrees in the core sorry 16 million Kelvin in the core and then the surface is around 6,000 and you go out to these prominences and the corona at a million and then 20 million for these flares. So we've walked away from a heating source and actually gotten warmer. So there's a couple of ways that scientists think that this could happen. And this is why we're sending Parker there. So on the left there is an image from Solar Dynamics Observatory and you're seeing here what looks like maybe a little bit of a tornado or at least twisting motion. And that's one of the ways that there's actually kind of a line here of magnetic dancing plasma. And that's one of the ways that scientists think we perhaps are heating the solar corona. The magnetic fields that you see dancing are anchored into the surface of the sun and they come up through the surface of the sun and they're being kind of waved around. And as they wave around that wave motion could create heat as the magnetic fields are moving. So that's one of the ways that it could possibly be heating the solar corona. So we wanted to get closer to see if there's evidence that this really is heating the corona. Another method, this is again on the right is a image of the Solar Dynamics Observatory as a flare will go off. And over here you'll see these and these reconnect very white lights so lots of energy is in that area. And so perhaps that's how you heat this atmosphere that's around it. And so then the loops reconnect and do that cataclysmic reorganization and pull off more energy. So that is another way that folks think that you could heat the solar corona. So going up close again to see if we're seeing the right amount of heating come off of these events. So now Parker itself, Parker was launched just about four years ago and it goes by Venus in order to be pushed closer and closer to the sun. The planets actually literally had to align so that we get seven different Venus assists in slowing us down and pushing us into the sun closer and closer. We have seven of these. And again, the prime mission is until 2025. And we will not be able to unfortunately get any closer because surprisingly it takes a lot of energy to fall into the sun. And we won't line up again with Venus for I think another 92 years. So there would be nobody to help us, no planet to help us get closer. So once we get there, we wanna obviously take data and understand more things. And we built models before we did any actual design and this happens to be in a Texas taco shop that we built our model here and used some foil and some things to kind of imagine what's on the spacecraft. And we wanted to make sure to take that temperature because that's one of the things that is a big puzzle. So we have to have something that is going to measure the temperature. I was talking about a wind and things flowing off of there. So we wanted something like an anemometer to be able to be able to sample that wind. We wanted to measure magnetic fields because there's a lot of magnetic fields there. And we wanna take pictures because as any good travelers, we have to have a lot of pictures as to where we go. And in the old days where we used to have slide shows, show everybody our slides. And I think these are probably much more interesting than most of the slide shows I sat through. But anyway, sweep is the solar wind electrons, alphas and protons. And it is one of four instrument suites on Parker Solar Probe. And this was the one I was most involved with. So this is again my bias here for these instruments. I love them all, but these are the three that I know kind of the most about. On the solar probe cup is the bravest little cup. It actually peaks around the heat shield that has its own heat shield in order to directly sample the wind. So this acts kind of as a temp, it's both a thermometer and an anemometer. So it tells you the direction and speed of the wind. And we have the solar probe analyzer, which also serves those two functions. It's just a little more sophisticated than that cup, but hiding back here. And then we have the solar probe analyzer for electrons and ions on the ahead. So A is ahead, B is behind. A, so the spacecraft travels towards the sun in this direction. So that's ahead and then behind is the B direction. And we have this nice satellite dish to talk to Deep Space Network, to download our data. We have these beautiful solar panels, which were designed specially to be able to tilt up. So normally folks fly with their, the solar panels full out, but because it's so hot and they would actually burn up exposed to that much sun, they have to actually pull in and just put out their very fingertips, the very end of the panel in order to be water-cooled and not burn up in that close proximity to the sun. So, and there is, in addition to that, there are the fields antennas out front, the heat shield, a water-cooled radiator in this section, in this section of water-cooled radiators. There was a magnetic boom on the back. This is an energetic particle detector. And on this side is also the whisper camera, the camera that we brought along for the scientific exploration. So what Sweeps measures is a velocity distribution function, which is kind of a fancy way to say that we measure the velocity in the speed and the direction of the particles. The density and the temperature of the solar wind. So we take the number of particles for a given energy and the center of where that is is the velocity and how much of their, how many of those are, we count all those up and that's the density of how many particles are in the sample. And then the spread of the velocity gives you a temperature. And so it makes these maps of electrons or alphas and protons as a function of direction and energy. And this is a glamor shot of the Solar Probe Cup, Board Parker Solar Probe. And like I was describing before is it has its own heat shield. So that little heat shield keeps it nice and cozy, able to make these electronic measurements. And there is actually back here an electronic box that hides behind the big heat shield and that's where all of our data is processed in the signals. And when originally designing this cup, there was a lot of thought put into obviously the types of materials and things like that. And at one point in time, there was a design for the cup that had diamonds, sapphires and rubies involved. And so I was all about this instrument. I was signed me up and we are the spares. But what happened was the diamonds where the diamond would have been silicon carbide to make those grids and it was too brittle to survive launch. There was also rubies that did not work out well as insulators, but we did end up with actually sapphires in the thing in the cup. We couldn't use aluminum which is another common metal because it would melt. So instead it's made of tungsten, molybdenum, nubidium, titanium and sapphire. And the sapphire is right there. It is white lab grown sapphire that acts as a standoff insulator. And I don't have any of the spare pieces. And another thing we do, so we shake these instruments really hard when you're on a rocket. There's a lot of vibration and you wanna make sure that the screws don't somehow fall out through that vibration. So you normally use a little bit of epoxy just to make sure that they stay in. But with this heat, you just can't use a glue. There's no glue that's really gonna do that. So instead, everything was safety wire. These are really little screws. I think they're double knot screws with then wired together. Everything is wired together so that they wouldn't fall out and injure something else on the spacecraft as we were launching. So that's another consideration that we had to do. Another piece of this is actually that normal test facilities are insufficient. Most of the time you would look for just something in deep space and be able to test in a vacuum system in a vacuum chamber that would pull out most of the air and simulate space. But we were also going super close to the sun with all this heat, which is something that's very different for most space missions. So a little ingenuity was needed. And the ingenuity came from repurposing IMAX film projectors. So there are one, two, three, and there's a fourth one hiding back there. IMAX film projector. So instead of expanding out into five stories, actually condensing that lobe and focusing it in, it's a relatively good approximation for a solar spectrum. For that light that they were gonna see, we're gonna take about four of them to get the same intensity to where, how close we're going to the sun. And we also had to put this nicely wrapped in tin foil is a particle accelerator. So a mini little particle beam that was also shown to the cup. So the cup could be hot and it could actually prove that it was going to be able to measure the particles because that's very important is to prove everything before you send it off into space. Many, many, many tests were done through this integration and testing period of the sun, of the Parker-Soller probe. And this is a beautiful image of testing the solar array. So testing each line and seeing if it's going to have enough power to power the instruments and power the navigation and the telecom that's needed for the spacecraft. So they were testing all these and these again are the little fingertip ones that will that power us while we're closest to the sun. So this is the Parker-Soller probe in the fairing. So the top of the very top of the rocket just before she was launched. So there's gonna be another side that comes in and kind of closes in on that one on what you're seeing there. And highlighted is the cup right around the, looking around the heat shield, span A and span B. And you see the power, the solar panels, the field antennas are tucked in and they are later, they were released a day or two after launch. And this is the magnetic tail, magnetic measurement that can stick to like a little tail. And then some of the other instruments are over on that side. So, and this is her rocket on a Delta IV heavy because we needed all that to get us directly to Venus. And it really did put us right in a direct path to Venus which was great because that saves some of the fuel for us to point because this heat shield has to be pointed directly at the sun. If it is ever a skew on any of these instruments we're to see that the full sunlight, the spacecraft would burn. So we would scorch and melt. So we can't have any of that. So we have to make sure it's very precisely pointed and there's fuel in a little jets that make micro corrections to make sure to keep it pointed at the sun. So again, the people of this, there's just an amazing, amazing group that put this together. And this is such a small amount of this. There are so many more engineers and folks who worked in machine shops as well as contracts and grants and all of these other things that helped make this happen. So the top picture is myself and Tony Case, the instrument scientist and Chris Schultz who is the integration specialist with the cup just before it was integrated into the spacecraft. And anything red is taken off before launch. So that was just how to hold it and fix it onto the spacecraft. There's some fun folks from the launch vehicle, the Delta IV launch team, Kennedy. And then a lot of scientists and this is again, just a small, small snippet. This is about a few months before launch, Dr. Parker, Eugene Parker, the namesake was there and we had the pleasure of hearing him talk and about his discovery. And his story is really a story of persistence and believing in yourself. He first theorized about the solar wind in 1958 and wrote a paper to that effect. And it was rejected multiple times because it was new and different and the scientists just didn't believe him. And finally, the editor looked at it and said, well, the math seems right. So are you willing to kind of stake, should we stake your reputation on this? And he said, I guess. And through that persistence, he was able to be the lead in founding business field and the field of study. And then Marsha Newabauer also used some of the earliest measurements of the solar wind and confirmed that there was a solar wind a year or two later through some other experiments. So this is really a great story and very aptly named for Gene. And unfortunately he passed away this year but was able to see his spacecraft launch. And now some of those pictures that were sent back from this beautiful spacecraft is this is a comet picture. One of just the first pictures we happened to get as we were commissioning. And we got some bonus science. So the original goals of Parker was really to study the sun. However, we visit Venus seven times and we currently don't have a mission at Venus. So we were able to turn on some of the instruments and take data around Venus. So this was a kind of getting more bang for your buck out of this mission. And this was a picture of Venus taken by the whisper instrument. You can kind of see some of the solar wind interacting with Venus. This area is Venetian Highland. And the streakiness, you're seeing some particles as well as some dust, that a dust streak on the cameras from whisper. And then this is a 1990s radar of Venus and then the whisper images that were taken as well. So kind of doing a little bit of a rotation of the image and seeing that we really are seeing that terrestrial, the terrestrial features of Venus or Venetian features, that terrestrial Venetian features on the whisper data. So there were other things that were found that come in and out of the solar system. Things like meteorites or come from inside the solar system and kind of rain down, things like meteorites. And that is one of the discoveries that whisper has actually had, is that normally dust grains are something that we don't really care about or where we went out of our houses on Earth. But dust grains are really leftover from the beginning of the planetary system that we live in. But as the sun formed and heated up, you do definitely break up those things and dust doesn't stick around. Either it became part of a planet or there are some rings left from where we didn't. And I'll replay this again, but there are different types of this dust and meteor streams. And some of them are understood, some of them aren't. And as we are flying closer and closer, we're encountering different bits of dust. And so Parker is doing this dust and meteorite and basic kind of some basic understanding of how planets and planetary systems evolve that we didn't again, was definitely not in our original thoughts, but the instruments are performing so well. So again, there are beta meteorites that are escaping the solar system due to the pressure of sunlight. So that's where you see all the blue, the simulations, the blue arrows going outward. And that was something that was known. And then for Parker, some of it is tracing all of that and tracing how much of that dust is actually coming from the middle, from the sun and close up to the sun. And again, these meteorite streams collide with the dust as well and they can also do more concentrated sprays of those meteorites as they're leaving. So that's another thing that Parker was able to fly through and actually confirm. So the other, so moving a little bit bigger as to things that fall at the sun, this is a stereo image of the sun that warmer, it's a little bit warmer atmosphere. And although there's a little bit of movement here, we don't really see very much, right? You don't see the dramatic coronal mass ejections that you saw from in that blue movie in the blue, the blue Lascaux movie that was at the beginning. But when you take a different, so you subtract one image from the last, you can actually tell what changed between the two of them. So when you do that, you're starting to see that there is a coronal mass ejection coming out to the left and it happened that Parker was flying through that during our first orbit. So with coronal mass ejections, I was giving some stats earlier about once a week during minimum and a couple of times a day during maximum and that we started actually at a minimum. Parker was launched at a minimum in solar activity. And so we didn't expect, we did the calculations because of where our orbits were. We thought that we might see seven coronal mass ejections in seven years. So basically one a year, just based on trajectory and things like that. We saw two within the first four months. So we were very happy about that because that gives us a chance to see them. And then these again are pictures that basically only the scientists can love, but I'm trying to hope that y'all can start liking these too. So this is Parker solar probe data. So it's a sweep data and fields data. So it's not the pretty pictures, but this is the particle data. And the magnetic fields, what you're looking for in terms of the coronal mass ejection is that there's a twist. There's a twist in the magnetic field. So we're looking for blue to go from negative to positive and both blues are kind of twisting. Then we're looking at rate of velocity kind of going up. So there's a little peak over there. We're looking for some proton density here as well as this temperature dropout that is an indication that we have cold plasma that we kind of dug up and injected with this coronal mass ejection. So this was the first coronal mass ejection that Parker solar probe saw in November of 2018. And again, we launched in August of 2018. So it was very, very quick that we found our first coronal mass ejection. So what's next for Parker? So September 6th, very soon, we're gonna have Parahelium 13, there are 25 total. December 11th will then be another one. So this is gonna get pretty quick for a while. Venus flyby meaning we're going to break our own speed and distance record. By the way, Parker is the fastest human made object as well as the closest human made object to the sun. So she'll break her own speed and distance record on after August of next year, so a year from now. And then her final on breaking her own speed and distance record will be in November of 2024. And then the final Parahelium in December of 2025. So that's what's next up for Parker, but the sun does not disappoint. Well, actually the moon takes a little credit here too. So upcoming are the eclipse 2023 and the annular eclipse on Saturday, October 14th, 2023. It's gonna cross across eight U.S. states and most of the continents of the U.S. will get a partial eclipse, but this is this path through Oregon, Nevada, a little bit of California, Utah, four corners area, Texas will all get and then down through South America, Central and South America, we'll get an annular eclipse or what's sometimes called a ring of fire. And then in 2024 is another total solar eclipse. So for those who enjoyed the experience of the 2017 eclipse, there's gonna be another chance. And this is the next chance for about 40 years. So it's really time to enjoy this. And it's gonna go through Mexico up through 13 states and then out through Canada. And all of the continental U.S. again, we'll experience some part of it. But for those who watch us or are in chasers around us, if you know anyone, they'll tell you, totality is worth it, is worth getting to that centerline. But it's also amazing that you're going to see an eclipse anywhere. And it's a great way to stay home and learn something. It is April 8th, so there might be some school considerations that you wanna stay close to home, that you can still view, safely view the sun through viewing glasses or alternate viewing methods. So what is a total solar eclipse? It happens when the moon passes between the sun and the earth and completely blocks the face of the sun. And this is again, the total solar eclipse. The annular one happens when the earth, sorry, the moon is actually at its furthest, so wait a minute, it's closest so that it can't actually, it can't actually cover the entire disc of the sun. And people, but this is for the total, the folks in the shadow will be able to see the total eclipse. The sky is gonna become very dark as if it was dawn or dusk. Birds come to roost. And during a total solar eclipse, if skies are clear, you can really see that corona, those mass ejections, those things like that or any prominences that are on there with your own eyes. And only, that is the only safe time to view the sun is during totality. During all of their phases of an eclipse, like these shown here, you would have your solar viewing glasses or you'd be using filters or some other method and not regular sunglasses, but total solar eclipse glasses to see these, and to see those. And so again, the next one would be on April 8th. And we're not just talking, we're not just doing the eclipses, but it's gonna be a very big year for the sun from fall of 2023 to the end of 2024. So hence the big year. And we really want to bring joy and curiosity to really an opportunity of a lifetime to experience as many parts of the sun and interaction with the sun as we can. And there's various ways to participate. We are looking to do a lot of citizen science at this point in time. So citizens able to do research-based work with folks to really make discoveries here. And so I will make sure to get these slides so that folks can take a look at this if they're interested in participating. And the big year comes from actually a birding term that is you try to see as many bird species in one year that you can. So what we're kind of challenging folks to do is to see as many different solar phenomena in one year that you can. So can you see an aurora? Can you see a total solar eclipse, an annular eclipse? What about, you know, it's solar max as well. We're building up to the very active sun. So can you say, can you see that? All of those things are gonna be available. So it's really gonna be a big year and an exciting time between fall 23 and 24. So with that, I'm happy to take questions. Thank you so much. All right, thank you. And we do indeed have some good questions here. And so if you have any more, please put them in the Q&A window. So one of the things you talked about, the probe, and you kind of talked about the lifetime of the probe, but then what happens to the Parker Solar probe after the mission? I think you said that perihelion number 26 was the last one. And so what happens after that? So 26 is the last of the prime mission. So technically, as long as we have fuel, we can go a little bit longer. Now the calculations range from about 10 years longer. It's not infinite, but maybe another 10 years. So maybe we'll get another 30 orbits in, maybe. And depending on funding and health of the spacecraft. But after that's all exhausted, we will unfortunately basically shut it down and it will end up turning to its side and the side will see the sun and will melt. And so the entire thing will melt into a little ball and just stay a little orbiting satellite at the same trajectory that we've been at for the last orbit. So it's not a spectacular. We wanted to figure out how to launch ourselves into the sun and blaze of glory, but it's surprisingly hard. If you have no more fuel left, you can't go and get anywhere. So, yep. Okay, so kind of sticking with the idea of the temperature of the sun, we have a question that the surface temperature of the sun is more or less the same as the center of the earth. The geothermal energy were fully developed. Do you think that global warming would increase because of the harvesting heat at depth to the surface of the earth? Hmm, okay, well, that's interesting. So if we use the heat in the center, but if we're converting it to, before converting it to energy, I don't know if we would necessarily release it all directly to the atmosphere. So I don't know if it would affect really the atmosphere much more negatively or create much more heat in the atmosphere because it should be, if it's efficient, it should be going into the doing, using its energy to do whatever work or thing that it, power whatever it's doing. So I don't think so. I think it should be. Yeah, these large theoretical geo-engineering projects are, it's kind of hard to model them and know what they might look like. Exactly. Kind of in the same vein thinking about global warming, how much of global warming is perhaps attributed to the sun? In addition to the year, 11 year sun cycle or coronal mass ejections or other phenomena increasing that can impact global warming. And so what do we notice about long-term trends with the earth or with the sun, I guess? Right, and overall with the sun, from what I understand of the models, the sun is kind of a one to 10% effect on the temperature of the earth, but hasn't changed at that level, at the same level that the actual warming of the earth has. So the trend for the warming of the earth is constantly up or consistently up, whereas the sun would have a cycle. So you would think that, okay, well, if it was really the sun, there should then be a cycle to the warming as well. And there's not at the bulk level. Like there might be little changes. Like if you're going up three degrees, it's like 0.1 degree is the sun and everything else is other sources. And I guess that's an interesting question to kind of extend that is, how much of the research that the Parker Solar Probe is doing can help us understand solar cycles and its influence on the earth environment as well as the other environments within the solar system? Definitely. And so Parker looks at a lot of how many times are we getting those energetic particles? How much of the corona mass ejections are coming out? Because from one view, you only, if you're only on earth, you only see one view, but Mars could be over here and Jupiter could be over here. So as we become space-faring society, we don't, the space weather predictions for the earth or forecast for the earth is different than that could be different from that at Mars. It could be stormy here and it could be fine here or it could be vice versa. So Parker is looking at that and trying to really get the basic data for how many times these things happen and then putting them into models to kind of, to understand them. So it is helping us understand that as well as then understand the atmosphere in the interactions of, hey, this is incoming, what happens as you're at earth then. So then we also understand that propagation. Great. So, and then there's kind of a mystery about, what exactly the probe is measuring. And so we have an interesting question. How do you accurately measure the speed of the probe as it's moving through space? When the SBC picks up the wind, how does it know how fast the wind was going compared to its own speed? Definitely, yeah. So we have the data from the trackers that are on board that are sent back to earth will know and then you do ranging. So you do know if I have to contact it and at one second it's here and one second it's there, you can then create a map as to how fast it's, or figure out how fast it's going. So we're able to figure out how fast the probe is going. And then the ferurity cup measures those particles coming in. So they come in within probably, between 1 1 8 and 1 1 1 1 28 of a second on the tells you where the particles are and how fast they're going. What that equates to again, is what is the peak number. So where do most of those stack up, we count them really, really, really fast and say, okay, so this is where most of them stack up. we say that that's the velocity of those particles. Now, the cup doesn't know about how fast the spacecraft is going. So then when it comes down to Earth, we have to say, okay, we have the spacecraft data and we have our cup data and we can either add or subtract based on the direction you're moving and which the particles are moving and then get the speed of the particles that without the speed of the spacecraft interfering. That's all a matter of figuring out what your frame of reference is. Exactly, it's all that frame of references. So we have another question. Is the extra heat from upwelling and squished plasma being contained by the magnetic fields at the corona? And like you said, colder below squished and hotter at the top. Is not the extra heat from upwelling and squished plasma being contained by the magnetic field? Some of it is being contained by the magnetic field. And then, yes, that causes the heat to kind of go through the atmosphere, right? Because as you're just pushing up heat, it can conduct away into, or convect away into other parts of the atmosphere. So that is one part of it, yep. So that's an interesting question too. You know, actually we have a couple of things here about the motion of the spacecraft too. What adjustments can you make do you have to make to the spacecraft orientation as it gets close to perihelion? Yeah, so definitely in perihelion, we have to make sure that that front heat shield is pointed directly to the sun. And again, that is a bunch of star trackers and autonomy telling it, hey, I might be seeing a star, so make sure to do a little adjustment here, a little adjustment there, making sure that you're lined up with the whole star pattern. And then there is I think also light sensors that if they were to sense anything, kind of again, do little micro adjustments back and forth. So yeah, so those are some adjustments that we have to do. When we also come out of close further away from the sun, there are sometimes turns of the spacecraft so that you turn that antenna towards the earth so it could actually see, because you do need a lot of sight in order to do the transmission of data. So we do, when we're further away, turn the spacecraft a little sometimes to get the data. And this is an interesting question. And I think it relates to, I mean, I kind of extended it a little bit. What's the maximum solar latitude that Parker can read data from? And would that be an important thing because some of the phenomena that you see on the sun are maybe dependent on their latitude and so does it make a difference for how far north or south you can get? It does. There are, especially with the activity, there ends up with bands. So the sun is approximately a sphere and there will become bands of magnetic activity and they through their cycle kind of go up and down, move up and down in the sun. And so it's important because you might get something different in the Northern and Southern hemisphere. So it is important. And there is a sister probe, solar orbiter, a joint program with the European Space Agency that actually will through its orbit instead of getting, it gets close, but then it stops and kind of starts going higher. So it will look down on the sun from a pole, only about 20 degrees, but it will be able to see a different angle. And so that's important to put together the three dimensions because in some ways, probe is kind of one point, but now you have another point up here. So you're starting to get the 3D picture of what's really happening. Okay, great. Thank you. Okay, we've got a time for just, let's go two more questions. And so here's one. I'm not quite sure that I understand what this is, but I'm sure you do. Maybe you alluded to it as, are we getting any closer to figuring out switchbacks? That's a good question. The switchbacks were announced last, it was last December or the December beforehand from what we saw with park roads. We saw the magnetic field doing these like switchbacks. So you would almost get the, almost seemed like you were kind of like whipping around with the magnetic field very quickly, which magnetic fields don't really like to do that. They're a little stiffer. So trying to figure out what was going on there whether that was a part or a signature of the heating that was happening there, and that the energy kind of flowing through these, they're much more common. We had seen them before in Helios data, which was in the 80s, but was not quite as frequent as that. So we are getting more data and there are papers and press, I think there'll be probably some more announcements in December timeframe around the AGU about switchbacks. And then one thing I think that there's been a couple of questions about this and I know that you dealt with it a lot, but maybe you could recap for a couple of the people that are post questions is about what we've learned about why the corona is so much hotter than the other layers of the sun. And I guess why is that important to us here on earth to know? Right, and it's important for us because that's where a lot of the space weather is coming from. That's really one of the most, one of can the most relevant in space is the fact that we see those energetic particles coming off from that layer. Those flares are happening there, getting super hot and throwing off the energetic particles that then again can affect astronauts if they're space walking or down a power grid. And then the coronal mass ejections again that can have dry effects on satellites and impact us as well. So those are part of the reasons why we care, why it's so hot. And then it is the scientific curiosity of okay, how does the star work? And so if our star works this way, can we figure out how other stars work similar farther away? And again, then solve other evolutionary of the universe questions or even exoplanets looking at how other planets, exoplanets can become habitable as well. All right, and I'm just gonna add one more question. And so personally, what aspect of this mission is most exciting to you and that you're most looking forward to? So what I think that I am most excited about is actually to continue to go deeper and deeper into the corona. We have touched our star. That was declared last December is that we actually were in the corona. And that was one of the goals is to spend time there to study that. And things change, the gas and the plasma change when you switch from being outside of that to inside of what they call the alphane surface or the surface that changes the characteristics from inside the star to outside the star. And so that was the first thing I was looking forward to. And now it's spending more time there and really getting to know it over the solar cycle. So getting up to solar max and being like, okay, well, how does it change? So we've kind of seen it as the more calm sun and what happens when it's very active and changing quickly and what new things we can do and seeing how over the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years folks use this data in different ways as well. Watching the next generation come up and use this data to make new discoveries that we just haven't even thought of yet. All right. Well, it's a very exciting mission and I'm looking forward to some more really great discovery. So. Definitely. Well, that's all for tonight everyone. Thank you very much Kelly for joining us this evening and thank you everyone for tuning in. You can find this webinar along with many others on the Night Sky Network website in the outreach resources section. Each webinar's page also features additional resources and activities. Tonight's presentation will also be on the Night Sky Network YouTube channel and also join us for our next webinar on Monday, September 19th when Dr. Joseph Lazio from NASA's JPL will share with us some recent discoveries through the use of radio telescopes. Also join us on Wednesday, two days from now, August 24th for a special International Observe the Moon Night webinar. You know that moon plays a big role in some of these events that are coming up with the eclipses and so, but it's something that's accessible to us and in some ways when we look at the moon we're kind of looking at the sun because guess where that light from the moon comes from? It's just reflected sunlight. And so we'll see our perennial webinar favorite Andrea Jones. So keep looking up and that's this Wednesday, August 24th. So keep looking up and we'll see you in two days and next month. So good night.