A 2018 artist’s concept shows the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft flying into the sun’s outer atmosphere on a mission to help scientists learn more about the star.
| Photo Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben
NASA’s pioneering Parker Solar Probe made history on December 24 when it flew closer to the sun than any other spacecraft, with its heat shield exposed to scorching temperatures topping 930 degrees Celsius.
Launched in August 2018, the spaceship is on a seven-year mission to deepen scientific understanding of our star and help forecast space-weather events that can affect life on the earth.
Tuesday’s historic flyby should have occurred at precisely 5:23 am IST (1153 GMT), although mission scientists will have to wait for confirmation until December 28 as they lose contact with the craft for several days due to its proximity to the sun.
“Right now, the Parker Solar Probe is flying closer to a star than anything has ever been before,” at 6.1 million kilometers away, NASA official Nicky Fox said in a video on social media on December 24 morning.
“It is just a total ‘yay, we did it’ moment.”
If the distance between the earth and the sun is the equivalent to the length of an American football field, the spacecraft should have been about four metres from the end zone at the moment of closest approach, a point that scientists call perihelion.
“This is one example of NASA’s bold missions, doing something that no one else has ever done before to answer long-standing questions about our universe,” Parker Solar Probe program scientist Arik Posner said in a statement on December 30.
“We can’t wait to receive that first status update from the spacecraft and start receiving the science data in the coming weeks.”
So effective is the heat shield that the probe’s internal instruments remain near room temperature — around 29 degrees Celsius — as it explores the sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona.
The Parker Solar Probe will also be moving at a blistering pace of around 690,000 km/hr, fast enough to fly from New Delhi Chennai in around 10 seconds.
“Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory,” said Nick Pinkine, mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.
“We’re excited to hear back from the spacecraft when it swings back around the sun.”
By venturing into these extreme conditions, the Parker probe has been helping scientists tackle some of the sun’s biggest mysteries: how solar wind originates, why the corona is hotter than the surface below, and how coronal mass ejections — massive clouds of plasma that hurl through space — are formed.
The Christmas Eve flyby was the first of three record-setting close passes. The next two are set to occur on March 22 and June 19, 2025, and both are expected to bring the probe back to a similarly close distance from the sun.
After its launch in 2018, the probe has been gradually circling closer towards the sun, using flybys of Venus to gravitationally pull it into a tighter orbit.
Published – December 30, 2024 01:48 pm IST
