NASA’s Parker Solar Probe entered aerospace history on Tuesday by flying closer to the Sun than any other spacecraft, with its heat shield exposed to scorching temperatures of more than 930 degrees Celsius.
Launched in August 2018, the spacecraft embarked on a seven-year mission to collect scientific data from Earth’s main star and help forecast space weather events that could affect life on our planet.
Tuesday’s historic flyby should have been recorded exactly at 06:53 (11:53 GMT), although the scientists in charge of the mission will have to wait until Friday for exact confirmation, as contact with the ship is lost for several days. due to its proximity to the Sun.
“This is an example of NASA’s bold missionsdoing something no one else has done before to answer long-standing questions about our universe,” Parker Solar Probe program scientist Arik Posner said in a statement Monday.
“We are looking forward to receiving that first spacecraft status update and beginning to receive the science data in the coming weeks,” he added.
Parker’s heat shield is so effective that the probe’s internal instruments remain at an ambient temperature of around 29°C as it advances its exploration of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona.
Parker will also move at a breakneck pace of around 690,000 kilometers per hour, fast enough to fly from the US capital Washington to Japan’s Tokyo in less than a minute.
“No man-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly be sending data from uncharted territory,” said Nick Pinkine, mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). in the city of Laurel, state of Maryland.
Defying extreme conditions, Parker has been helping scientists address some of the greatest mysteries of the Sun: how the solar wind originates, why the corona is hotter than the surface below, and how coronal mass ejections (massive clouds of plasma ejected into space) form.
