Historic Milestone 3.8M miles from Surface of Sun – NASA Solar Parker Probe Launched in
2018,
Dr. Ravi Sharma, NASA Apollo Achievement Award 1969
Some of my NASA and Space industry colleagues are capable of outlining several technologies that would accelerate from translunar or escape velocity trajectories to 400k mph with safe human tolerable acceleration levels as well as decelerations for surface landings. Perhaps these would include Powerful Nuclear fusion (fission / Thorium) Propulsion or ion engines?
Thanks to Tariq Malik Editor for yet another valuable Space.com post on this Parker Solar Probe. What we also need from Space.com or other preprint servers like arXiv is a running status and progress report for semitechnical audiences as well that includes discoveries or phenomena on our star and its heliosphere recorded by Parker, Aditya, Chandra, JWST, European probes and other Observatories, especially including synchronization, verification and CME, Solar Activities, impact on ionosphere, Space assets and terrestrial grids etc.
Coming back, description of plasma and ionized matter as classical thermodynamic entities is often misleading. Temperature makes sense when there is stable enclosed configuration of phase of matter. Solar Corona thermodynamic parameters, even the Maxwell Boltzmann Distribution of Blackbody is an approximation rooted in Quantum and Field theoretic descriptions of these unique states of matter-energy. Magnetohydrodynamic surface phenomena ought to be only approximately described in terms of thermodynamics. Anisotropy, variety of re-combinations, radiation and radiative transfers as attempted by stellar and solar astrophysicists are all going to be helpful in interpreting these new data that are challenging our current understanding of the Sun.
Accelerating learning with hopefully beneficial AI would make such journeys to planets by humas possible at such speeds hopefully in the next hundred years!
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