NASA said Friday that it is Parker solar probe was “safe” and functioning normally after the closest approximation to that to date was successfully completed Sun by any man-made object.
The spacecraft flew 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from the Sun’s surface on Dec. 24 and entered the Sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona, with a mission to help scientists learn more about the nearest star of the earth.
The agency said the operations team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland received the signal, a beacon sound, from the probe just before midnight Thursday.
The spacecraft is expected to send detailed telemetry data about its status on January 1, NASA added.
According to the NASA website, the spacecraft moved at speeds of up to 430,000 miles per hour (692,000 km/h) and endured temperatures of up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius).
“This close-up study of the Sun allows Parker Solar Probe to make measurements that will help scientists better understand how material in this region is heated to millions of degrees and trace the origin of the solar wind (a continuous flow of material leaving the Sun). . , and discover how energetic particles are accelerated to near the speed of light,” the agency added.
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“We are rewriting the textbooks on how the sun works with the data from this probe,” said Dr. Joseph Westlake, NASA’s heliophysics director, told Reuters.
“This mission was theorized in the 1950s,” he said, adding that it was an “amazing achievement to develop technologies that allow us to delve deeper into our understanding of how the sun works.”
Launched in 2018, the Parker Solar Probe is gradually orbiting closer to the sun, using flybys of Venus to use gravity to pull it into a closer orbit with the sun.
Westlake said the team is preparing for even more flybys in the extended mission phase in hopes of capturing unique events.
–Reporting by Bipasha Dey, Shubham Kalia and Surbhi Misra in Bengaluru; Editing by Kate Mayberry
