This image made available by NASA shows an artistic rendering of the Parker Solar Probe approaching the Sun.
Steve Gribben/AP/Johns Hopkins APL/NASA
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Steve Gribben/AP/Johns Hopkins APL/NASA
Icarus may be known in Greek mythology as the one who flew too close to the sun. But now it’s NASA’s Parker Solar Probe that has made this daring journey a reality.
On Christmas Eve, the car-sized spacecraft came within 3.8 million kilometers of the sun’s surface, marking humanity’s closest approach.
To put things in perspective, NASA’s probe was about 10 times closer to the original star than to the orbit of the innermost planet, Mercury.
While flying around the sun, Parker also set the record for the fastest man-made object, reaching an incredible speed of 430,000 mph, which is fast enough to travel from New York to Tokyo in less than a minute.
To get this close, the Parker Solar Probe had to endure the sun’s extreme heat and radiation like no spacecraft before. Scientists won’t know if Parker survived or what his condition is until Friday, when he is expected to send his first signal back to Earth since his flyby.
“He’s breaking all these records and it’s just a total ‘Yeah! We did it!’ moment,” Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. video on December 24.
Parker launched in 2018 as part of an unprecedented mission to study the sun. The goal is to better understand long-standing mysteries, such as why the Sun’s extended atmosphere is hotter than its surface and the origin of the solar wind. Scientists also hope the mission will help predict solar storms, which can trigger breathtaking and widespread auroras but they also pose a threat to power grids and radio signals.
Over the past six years, Parker has ventured closer and closer to the sun. In 2021, it made history as the first spacecraft to enter the Sun’s upper atmosphere, also known as the corona.
NASA said Parker will begin sending back data collected during its flybys of the sun in late January.
“Until recently, we simply didn’t have the technology. In 2018, everything changed with the launch of Parker Solar Probe,” Nour Rawafi, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe project scientist at NASA’s Applied Physics Laboratory. Johns Hopkins University (APL). ), explained on TED Radio Hour earlier this month.
He added: “It revolutionized our understanding of the sun.”
Parker was equipped with a special heat shield that reflects light, absorbs heat and is cooled by a network of water-filled pipes, according to Rawafi.
This design keeps the interior of the probe near room temperature, even inside the sun’s outer atmosphere, which can vary from 1,600 to 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit.
The mission is named after Eugene Parker, who first predicted the existence of the solar wind in the 1950s. It is the only NASA mission named after a living person. In 2018, Parker was able to witness the launch of the rocket that sent the probe into space. He died in 2022 at the age of 94.