NASA’s pioneering Parker Solar Probe made history Tuesday by flying closer to the Sun than any other spacecraft with its heat shield exposed to scorching temperatures of more than 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit (930 degrees Celsius).
Launched in August 2018, the spacecraft is on a seven-year mission to deepen scientific understanding of our star and help predict space-weather events that could affect life on Earth.
Tuesday’s historic flight was scheduled to occur at exactly 6:53 a.m. (1153 GMT), although mission scientists will have to wait until Friday for confirmation because they will lose contact with the spacecraft for several days due to its close proximity to the sun.
If the distance between Earth and the Sun is equal to the length of an American football field, the spacecraft should be about four yards (meters) from the end zone at the time of closest approach – known as perihelion.
“This is an example of NASA’s bold missions, doing something that has the potential to answer long-standing questions about our universe,” Parker Solar Probe program scientist Eric Posner said in a statement Monday. “No one has ever done it before.”
“We can’t wait to get the first status updates from the spacecraft and begin receiving science data in the coming weeks.”
The heat shield is so effective that the probe’s internal instruments remain close to room temperature — about 85F (29C) — as it explores the sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona.
Parker will also accelerate to about 430,000 mph (690,000 kph), fast enough to fly from the U.S. capital, Washington, to Tokyo in less than a minute.
“No man-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will return data from a truly unknown area,” said Nick Pinkin, mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.
“We’re excited to hear the spacecraft’s reaction as it moves around the Sun.”
By entering these extreme conditions, Parker is helping scientists tackle some of the Sun’s biggest mysteries: how the solar wind is generated, why the corona is hotter than the surface below, and how coronal mass ejections – plasmas – occur. Huge clouds of water that collide form space.
The Christmas Eve flyby is the first of three record-setting close passes, with the next two – on March 22, 2025 and June 19, 2025 – both expected to return the probe to the same distance from the Sun.
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