While it would be fun to punt a billion dollar spacecraft into the sun just to see the weird spikes on the telemetry data, you can't actually get any realtime data from the probe during close solar approach. Stars emit quite a lot of RF, and the antenna on Parker has to be small enough to fit behind the sunshield. Parker has to survive each perihelion in a functional state in order to downlink readings.
Presumably after the end of the scheduled mission there will an attempt to get funding for an extended mission to take it in closer. My impression is they can't put it on the official schedule if it's not funded, and speculatively funding spacecraft operations decades into the future would take big chunks out of NASA's budget.
> While it would be fun to punt a billion dollar spacecraft into the sun just to see the weird spikes on the telemetry data, you can't actually get any realtime data from the probe during close solar approach.
Such a glaring blind spot could potentially hinder law enforcement to the point that visibility into future investigations goes completely dark.
> On this date, Solar Orbiter will be less than 1/3 the distance from the sun to Earth. That’s [...] about 1/3 of an astronomical unit (AU).
Does the journalist know what an AU is?
For those that don't know, an AU is the distance from the earth to the sun, so you could just as well write:
"On this date, Solar Orbiter will be less than 1/3 the distance from the sun to Earth. That’s 29.8 million miles (48 million km) or about 1/3 of the distance from the sun to Earth."
(And yes, since if I don't point this out someone else will, strictly speaking the AU is defined as some fixed number of meters. But that number wasn't pulled out of a hat...)
Did you consider that the article is educating people? It even uses the opportunity to have a link to one of their other articles specifically about AU.
In comparison, you wrote two redundant sentences and didn't teach anyone what an AU was, choosing instead to go on a grammar critique that winds up teaching less. Its often common to incorporate synonyms in editorial writing specifically to avoid writing the same phrases twice.
The way to educate people is to say "less than 1/3 the distance to the sun (that is, less than 1/3 of an astronomical unit or AU)".
It would have been easy to structure the sentence in a way to make it clear that this is not a coincidence. This is exactly the missed opportunity that I was trying to point out. If you write "less than 1/3 X" and then later "or about 1/3 Y", surely you can agree that's not the very best way to point out that X and Y are definitionally equivalent, right?
The article seems to be technically correct, but the confusion demonstrated here by inimino is evidence it probably won't educate people. Sometimes proving a person wrong proves them right!
If you want to get all definitional, an AU isnt the distance between the sun and earth. It is 1/2 the diameter of the earth's orbit. It is from one theoretical point to another and doesnt take the radius of either the sun or the earth into account. The real "distance between the sun and the earth" is 1AU minus the radii of the earth and sun. And comming up with a size/radius for the sun is itself a huge discussion.
That's an interesting question. For example, if you're calculating the gravitational pull between the earth and sun F = G(m_1 * m_2) / r^2, you will reach for the distance between the centers of the two masses. This is the definition I intended and if you took a poll I think this is how most people would interpret it. I've never heard anyone interpret distance between two celestial bodies as minimum distance, although that's certainly a valid possible interpretation!
If you are doing something like shining a laser beam at the moon, or radar at a planet, then the distances are between the surfaces of the bodies rather than between the gravity centere. And if you are flying a probe towards the sun, the altitude above the surface becomes the more important number than the AU distance.
The reason why we say "arithmetic mean" when we want to be precise is because "average" can mean any centralizing statistic. The great Carlin no doubt realized the joke would not go off as well with the word "median", and the way he told it wasn't wrong.
It's planned to hit 6.9 million km in 2025. (Ten solar radii)