The Solar Probe Plus Mission: Humanity’s First Visit to Our Star

By N. Fox, M. Velli, S. Bale, R. Decker, A. Driesman, R. Howard, Justin C. Kasper, J. Kinnison, M. Kusterer, D. Lario and 3 more. 2016

1,092 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Solar Probe Plus (SPP) will be the first spacecraft to fly into the low solar corona. SPP’s main science goal is to determine the structure and dynamics of the Sun’s coronal magnetic field, understand how the solar corona and wind are heated and accelerated, and determine what processes accelerate energetic particles. Understanding these fundamental phenomena has been a top-priority science goal for over five decades, dating back to the 1958 Simpson Committee Report. The scale and concept of such a mission has been revised at intervals since that time, yet the core has always been a close encounter with the Sun. The mission design and the technology and engineering developments enable SPP to meet its science objectives to: (1) Trace the flow of energy that heats and accelerates the solar corona and solar wind; (2) Determine the structure and dynamics of the plasma and magnetic fields at the sources of the solar wind; and (3) Explore mechanisms that accelerate and transport energetic particles. The SPP mission was confirmed in March 2014 and is under development as a part of NASA’s Living with a Star (LWS) Program. SPP is scheduled for launch in mid-2018, and will perform 24 orbits over a 7-year nominal mission duration. Seven Venus gravity assists gradually reduce SPP’s perihelion from 35 solar radii (RS$R_{S}$) for the first orbit to <10RS${<}10~R_{S}$ for the final three orbits. In this paper we present the science, mission concept and the baseline vehicle for SPP, and examine how the mission will address the key science questions

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5d0142f0a8eee32bcf9c869f64d55a31b4745f75

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. C. Chen
2. S. Cranmer
3. E. Quataert
4. Eckart Marsch
5. S. Bale
6. William H. Matthaeus
7. R. Forsyth
8. B. Chandran

Citations in the corpus

• Switchbacks in the Near-Sun Magnetic Field: Long Memory and Impact on the Turbulence Cascade (2019, background): “In November 2018 Parker Solar Probe [19] became the closest spacecraft ever to the Sun, reaching a distance of 35.”
• The FIELDS Instrument Suite for Solar Probe Plus (2016, background): “As described in Fox et al. (2016), many of the ideas about coronal heating and solar wind acceleration involve Alfvén waves, collisionless shocks, magnetic reconnection, plasma instabilities, and exospheric physics.”
• The Solar Orbiter magnetometer (2020, methodology): “…by the twin Helios spacecraft in the 1970s and 1980s (Schwenn & Marsch 1990, 1991), which reached 0.29 au (62 solar radii, RS); early data are also available from Parker Solar Probe (Fox et al. 2016) launched in August 2018, with a closest approach to date of 35 RS, and ultimately 9.8 RS.”
• Origins of the Ambient Solar Wind: Implications for Space Weather (2017, background): “We anticipate that the Parker Solar Probe (Fox et al. 2016) and Solar Orbiter (Müller et al. 2013), both scheduled for launch in 2018, will revolutionize our conception of the inner heliosphere.”
• Nature of Kinetic Scale Turbulence in the Earth's Magnetosheath (2016, background): “This region of the solar corona will soon be measured in situ by the Solar Probe Plus space- craft (Fox et al. 2016), allowing this to be tested directly.”