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The Parker Solar Probe, one of NASA's most extreme spacecraft, has been gathering data on our sun for the past year, revealing some unusual phenomena in the outer atmosphere. But solar science isn't the only feather in PSP's extremely hot hat. Astronomers at the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) have used the probe's specialized camera to detect the faint signal of an asteroid dust trail that has avoided detection for decades.
Parker is equipped with the Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR), a suite of cameras built specifically for taking photos around the sun. Usually, light from the trail is obscured by the brightness of the sun, but the WISPR cameras are specially designed to filter out all that light, giving astronomers a chance to see the faint dust cloud trailing asteroid 3200 Phaethon.
Phaethon is a well-characterized and slightly bizarre asteroid, about 3.6 miles in width, that more closely resembles a comet. It travels closer to the sun than any other named asteroid but its trail is particularly visible near the star, because it's more densely packed. It also has a dark past.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13 2019, @05:24PM (3 children)
NASA should be focusing on proving global warming, not being space paparazzi.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13 2019, @06:01PM (1 child)
Um, did it not occur to you that studying how the sun heats an asteroid/comet might just have something to do with how the sun heats the earth?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13 2019, @08:36PM
The earth is warmed more by CO2 than the sun. Like venus which is barely closer to the sun but hundreds of degrees hotter due to CO2.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday December 13 2019, @08:26PM
You can't prove to those who have already decided not to believe, so why bother.
There's already more data than any single person can read to show that it's correct, so that's no reason to collect more.
So you look into things for other reasons. Perhaps you'll find something related to climate, but the odds of it affecting the argument are too poor to calculate.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.