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NEWS > SCIENCE > NASA PREPARES MISSION TO WIPE OUT SOLAR MENACE
NASA PREPARES MISSION TO WIPE OUT SOLAR MENACE
February 10 2010
Washington, D.C. – For as long as humanity has existed we have looked towards the Sun. In mythology, religion, science, and art our obsession with the Sun has been
never ending since we first looked upon a sunny day and realized it for what it was.
Even today with much of mystery behind the giant ball of gas removed, a sunny day or a beautiful sunset still move us in that same way as it did our ancestors. As the source of all life and so much culture in our lives, the Sun remains as important as ever.
Our giant star though is not completely benign. A boiling mass of hydrogen and helium is a giant surging fireball that will one day eventually expand and explode, destroying Earth and every other planet in the Solar System. Even today with plumes of radiation surging from her surface, the Sun poses a threat to orbiting satellites and Earth-bound communications. Those flares can also cause damage to human beings, throwing protons at our skin and causing deep damage. Even on a calm day the radiation thrown off by the star can cause cancer in even the least vulnerable of people. It is with these threats in mind that NASA has begun one of its most ambitious projects yet, seeking to unravel the mysteries of the star and assess how we might best be able to confront the threat it poses to our existence.
“We know things happen on the sun which affect spacecraft, communications and radio signals. If we can understand the underlying causes of what is happening then we can turn this information into forecasts. The key thing about the mission is that it is not just pure science for its own sake. There is likely to be a direct and immediate benefit for people,” said project scientist Barbara Thompson to The Times. “The sun is something that we are going to be living with for a very long, perhaps forever, so it is very important to be able to live and work alongside it and that means assessing both its methods and its motivations, just as you would with any enemy. In that way we will better be able to combat offensives that could harm our species and other life on this planet.”
In ‘The Art of War’ Sun Tzu wrote ‘If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril’, a philosophy that NASA has long adhered to.
“In many ways NASA struck the first real blow of the Cold War for the United States. By putting a man on the moon they forever put the country ahead of Soviets, not only challenging their national pride but also forcing them to spend ridiculous amounts of money trying to challenge, which ultimately helped to end the Soviet Union,” said Scrape TV Science analyst Dr. Howard Poe. “There were other factors of course but NASA played a major role that cannot be ignored. Now they are once again taking up the mantle of defence against a far more formidable enemy than the Russian Bear.”
At the height of the Cold War, it was believed that the two powers could have eliminated all life on the planet but not actually destroyed the planet as the Sun will inevitably do if we are unable to stop it.
“The bigger issue is that there are much bigger stars out there than our own. There are stars bigger than our entire solar system and so if we are unable to deal with a minor body like the sun than we are going to be in serious trouble if one of those giants comes around looking for trouble, or if we make great strides into space” continued Poe. “I mean some of these possibilities are off in the very distant future but future generations will benefit from our actions today even if we are unable to resist the threat ourselves. The knowledge we will gain today will be invaluable.”
NASA’s first volley will be the Solar Dynamics Observatory which will spend five years collecting information on the enemy.
Anna Phillips, Science Correspondent
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