Nasa reveals important update on Parker spacecraft’s historic closest-ever approach to the Sun days after daring mission
The Parker Solar Probe is safe and functioning normally after completing the closest-ever pass of the Sun by any human-made object, Nasa has announced.
The daring spacecraft flew just 3.8million miles (6.1mkm) from the Sun’s surface on 24 December.
That might sound like a lot, but it’s a stone’s throw given that the Sun is 91.4 million miles from Earth.
The distance is seven times closer to the Sun than any other spacecraft has ventured to date.
While moving at up to 430,000mph (692,000k/ph), Parker endured temperatures of up to 982C (1,800F) as it dipped into the Sun’s outer atmosphere.
The probe is kept safe by the Thermal Protection System, an 8ft heat shield that weighs around 160lbs.
Nasa launched Parker back in 2018 to examine our local star, in hopes it would reveal more about solar activity.
The nail-biting mission took the Parker probe out of communications range with experts on Earth.
The operations team at the Johns Hopkins University applied physics laboratory in Maryland received the signal from the probe shortly before midnight on Thursday.
The signal, a “beacon tone”, confirmed the probe survived the trip.
There’s lots about the Sun that scientists still don’t understand – such as why the corona – the Sun’s outer atmosphere – is so much hotter than the surface.
The probe, however, is expected to help bring answers.
In a statement, Nasa said: “This closeup study of the sun allows Parker solar probe to take measurements that help scientists better understand how material in this region gets heated to millions of degrees, trace the origin of the solar wind (a continuous flow of material escaping the sun), and discover how energetic particles are accelerated to near light speed.”
The space agency agency said it should receive data from the probe on 1 January – after being sent across tens of millions of miles of space.
The seven-year mission is scheduled to end around September 2025.
The Sun – all the facts you need to know
What is it, why does it exist, and why is it so ruddy hot all the time?
- The Sun is a huge star that lives at the centre of our solar system
- It’s a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, and provides most of the energy for life on Earth
- It measures a staggering 865,000 miles across – making it 109 times bigger than Earth
- But its weight is 330,000 times that of Earth, and accounts for almost all of the mass in the Solar System
- The Sun is mostly made up of hydrogen (73%), helium (25%) and then a number of other elements like oxygen, carbon and iron
- Its surface temperature is around 5,505C
- Scientists describe the Sun as being “middle-aged”
- The Sun formed 4.6 billion years ago, and it’s been in its current state for around four billion years
- It’s expected that it will remain stable for another five billion years
- It doesn’t have enough mass to explode as a supernova
- Instead, we expect it to turn a hulking red giant
- During this phase, it will be so big that it will engulf Mercury, Venus and Earth
- Eventually it will turn into an incredibly hot white dwarf, and will stay that way for trillions of years