We love our sunshine in California and on Dec. 21, we will have the least daylight in 2019. The winter solstice has a mere 9 hours, 55 minutes of light so we had the bright idea to give you a sun fix with a look at NASAs latest solar mission.

NASAs Parker Solar Probe has gone closer to the sun than any man-made object and is capable of withstanding temperatures up to 3,000 degrees (volcanic lava is between 1,300-2,200 degrees).

Its thermal protection is provided by a 4.5 inch thick carbon composite shield. Other instruments outside the shield are made from tungsten, a metal with the highest known melting point of 6,192 degrees.

Even the instruments wires are a modern technological feat most cables would melt at such close proximity to the Sun. The mission team solved the problem by growing sapphire crystal tubes to suspend the wiring, and made the wires from niobium, an extremely hard metal.

The science of the Sun-Earth connection is called Heliophysics and is a relatively young science.

In August 2018, NASA launched the probe on a seven-year mission that will bring the probe within 4 million miles of the sun. The probe has completed three of 24 planned passes through the Suns atmosphere, the corona. This month, four papers in the journal Nature describe what scientists have learned from this unprecedented exploration.

Sun Weather monitoring is becoming more and more important as the Suns flares and storms can cause blackouts due to surges in power grids as well as knock out satellites. The probe is measuring the solar wind which carries the Suns magnetic field and flows out from the Sun at around 1 million mph.

The probe is named for a living scientist: Dr. Eugene Parker, who theorized the existence of the solar wind. It is one of several spacecraft dedicated to monitoring the sun, most notably the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), which monitors the suns energy 24 hours a day.

JOURNEY TO THE SUN

Follow the line from the Earth to the Sun.

SIZED UPIf the Earth was the size of a nickel, the suns diameter would be about the height of an average house door. The sun is 864,000 miles across, 109 times the diameter of Earth.

Sources: NASA, Spaceweather.com, Space.com, NOAA

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On the winter solstice heres what NASAs learning about the sun - OCRegister