Do you know the myth of Icarus? Like all myths it has an ethical function (Icarus’ ambition to fly too high, towards the Sun, burning his wings) but it was also conceived when we knew little about the Universe. The sky was the sky, the stars were fairy lights, and the Sun, well, the Sun was in the sky. But I’ll come back to the myth later, because in the meantime Parker is safe and sound. Who is Parker? It is the probe that almost touched the Sun, passing just six million kilometers around it, at a speed of 692 thousand kilometers per hour, and which will allow us to get to know our star like never before.
It is, declares the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, “the first artificial object closest to a star”. Let’s say the first artificial human object, from distant stars or other galaxies that we know of. However, a big step towards understanding our space.
I return for a second to Icarus and the ancients, which was not the Parker probe: but did they really have to give it wax wings? Which, going too high, melt due to the heat. In reality, if Icarus had managed to fly, he would have frozen, not burned.
Furthermore, it would never have managed to escape the Earth’s atmosphere, given that it requires a speed of 11km per second. A rocket, in short. In any case, we are now awaiting Parker’s results, who is not a myth but has accomplished a fantastic scientific feat.