Why is it extremely important to explore the Sun?
Here you can hear the sound of the Sun!
Learning about the Universe
Besides enabling us to keep warm and grow food, the Sun affects us in many fundamental ways, making it crucial to study and explore it.
The Sun is a star like any other, which means that by studying it we can understand more about stars throughout the Universe.
Accumulating knowledge about the stars can improve our understanding of galaxies and the Universe as a whole.
Another reason why observing the Sun is important is solar wind. The solar wind is a flow of particles that comes off the Sun with a speed higher than 1 million km/hour.
This is the phenomenon responsible for triggering the wonderful auroras that can be seen close to the poles, but it can also have devastating effects on satellites in space and on our communication network.
Solar
Wind
The radiation that the solar wind releases can affect both the astronauts and the equipment on board of a spacecraft. NASA has found aluminium to be a good shield to protect the spacecraft, but there are still high-speed particles which can pass through the shields and damage important electronic components, compromising entire missions.
Large emissions of solar matter, called coronal mass ejection, could wreak havoc on our communication system. Such a scenario would cause Earth’s magnetic field to be so disturbed that GPS would be thrown off by up to miles, electronic systems could be knocked out and aircrafts would lose radio communications.
This is one of the reasons that made NASA launch many spacecrafts in the Sun’s direction, monitoring these changes in the radiation so it is possible to predict when a storm is coming. But even with these satellites orbiting the Sun, they can only give us minutes or hours of warning, since they make a prediction by analysing images taken in real-time. As of now, we still don’t have a way to predict these emissions before they happen.
Nuclear fusion
Additionally, the Sun is the perfect model to learn how to make nuclear fusion possible here on Earth. By observing the Sun’s atmosphere, we can better understand how plasma works. If scientists were to completely understand how to control plasma, it is possible for fusion energy to finally become a reality.
All in all, the final goal of solar exploration, and space exploration in general, is to make our life on Earth better. Every discovery made during these missions does not only have an academic value, but it will most likely become the foundation of a new technology that can improve our daily lives.