With the spacecraft no longer in contact, it will be Friday before mission operators confirm its historic flyby.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is expected to make history by flying into the Sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona, to help scientists learn more about Earth’s closest star.
“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, mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a US space agency blog on Tuesday.
Parker was on track to fly 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles) from the sun’s surface at 11:53 GMT on Tuesday. With the spacecraft no longer in contact, it will be Friday before mission operators can confirm the spacecraft’s status after the close flyby.
The spacecraft travels at speeds of up to 692,000 km/h (430,000 miles per hour), making it fast enough to fly from Washington, DC to Tokyo in under a minute. It will withstand temperatures of up to 982 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees Fahrenheit), NASA said on its website.
If the distance between Earth and the Sun was the length of a 100-yard (91.4 meter) American football field, the spacecraft would have been about 4 meters (4.4 yards) from the end zone at the time of its approach Approach – known as perihelion.
When the probe entered the solar atmosphere for the first time in 2021, it found new details about the boundaries of the solar atmosphere and collected close-up images of coronal streamers, spike-like structures observed during solar eclipses.
Since the spaceship launched in 2018The probe gradually circles closer to the sun and uses flybys of Venus to use gravity to pull it into a closer orbit with the star of our solar system.
An instrument aboard the spacecraft captured visible light from Venus, giving scientists a new way to see through the planet’s dense clouds to the surface below, NASA said.
By venturing into these extreme conditions, Parker helped scientists solve some of the sun’s biggest mysteries: how the solar wind forms, why the corona is hotter than the surface below, and how coronal mass ejections – massive clouds of plasma that travel through space – occur to fling – comes formed.
Tuesday’s flyby is the first of three record-breaking flybys, with the next two – on March 22 and June 19 – expected to bring the probe back to a similarly close distance from the sun.
