A NASA space probe may have made history by flying closer to the sun than any object sent before.
The Parker Solar Probe was on track to fly about 3.7 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from the Sun’s surface as of 6:53 a.m. ET on Tuesday
But NASA won’t have contact with the spacecraft for several days, meaning it won’t know whether it survived its flyby of the sun until Dec. 27, when Parker will send another beep to confirm its health, NASA said on its website.
“No man-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly be sending back data from unknown territory,” Nick Pinkine, operations manager for the Parker Solar Probe mission at APL, said on the NASA website.
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“We look forward to hearing from the spacecraft as it orbits the sun again.”
The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 to look at the Sun up close. Since then, it flew directly through the solar corona – the outer atmosphere visible during a total solar eclipse.
Its purpose is to track the flow of energy, study the heating of the solar corona and explore what accelerates the solar wind.
Parker planned to get more than seven times closer to the Sun than previous spacecraft, reaching a speed of 430,000 mph (690,000 km/h) at closest approach.
Its instruments are protected from the sun by a 4.5-inch-thick carbon composite shield that can withstand temperatures of nearly 3,000°F (1,377°C).
It will orbit the sun at this distance until at least September.
Scientists hope to better understand why the corona is hundreds of times hotter than the sun’s surface and what drives the solar wind, the supersonic stream of charged particles that is constantly flying away from the sun.
