Illustration courtesy of NASA/Johns Hopkins APL shows an artist’s vision for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe.
NASA’s pioneering Parker Solar Probe made history Tuesday by flying closer to the sun than any other spacecraft, with a heat shield exposed to scorching heat of more than 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit (930 degrees Celsius). I made it.
Launched in August 2018, the spacecraft is on a seven-year mission to improve scientific understanding of our star and help predict space weather phenomena that could affect life on Earth. I’m here.
Tuesday’s historic flyby was supposed to occur at exactly 6:53 a.m. (1153 GMT), but mission scientists were unable to confirm because its proximity to the sun meant it would lose contact with the spacecraft for several days. I’ll have to wait until Friday to get it.
If the distance between Earth and the sun was equivalent to the length of an American football field, the spacecraft would have been about 4 yards (meters) from the end zone at the moment of closest approach, known as perihelion.
“This is an example of NASA’s bold mission, doing something no one has done before to answer long-standing questions about the universe,” Parker Solar Exploration Program Scientist Arik Posner said in a statement Monday. I’m going,” he said.
“We can’t wait to receive our first status updates from the spacecraft and begin receiving science data in the coming weeks.”
The heat shield is so effective that the spacecraft’s internal instruments are kept at temperatures close to room temperature, or around 85 degrees Celsius (29 degrees Celsius), as it explores the Sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona.
Parker will also travel at speeds of around 430,000 miles per hour (690,000 kilometers per hour), fast enough to fly from Washington, D.C. to Tokyo in less than a minute.
Nick Pinkin, mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, said: “No man-made object has ever come this close to a star, so Parker is truly in uncharted territory. We’re going to get the data back.”
“We look forward to hearing back from the spacecraft as it circles around the sun and returns.”
By venturing into these extreme conditions, Parker hopes to help scientists solve some of the sun’s biggest mysteries: how the solar wind is generated, why the corona is hotter than the surface below, and coronal mass ejection. We have been helping to understand how a giant plasma cloud (a giant plasma cloud flying through space) occurs. — is formed.
The Christmas Eve flyby was the first of three record-setting flybys, with the next two (March 22, 2025 and June 19, 2025) both taking the spacecraft away from the Sun. It is expected that it will return to a similar close range.
© 2024 AFP
Citation: NASA probe closest to sun (December 24, 2024) Retrieved December 25, 2024 from https://phys.org/news/2024-12-nasa-probe-closest-sun.html
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