A NASA spacecraft 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 6.1 million miles from the sun’s surface at 6:53 a.m. ET Tuesday.
But NASA will be out of contact with the probe for a few days, meaning it won’t know if it survived its pass by the sun until Dec. 27, when Parker prepares to transfer another tone beacon to confirm his health, NASA said. on its website.
“No man-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly send back data from unexplored territories,” said Nick Pinkine, Parker Solar Probe mission operations manager at APL, on the NASA website.
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“We are excited to hear from the spacecraft when it returns around the sun.”
The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 to get a close look at the sun. Since then, it has flown over the solar corona, the outer atmosphere visible during a total solar eclipse.
Its goal is to trace the flow of energy, study the heating of the solar corona and explore what accelerates the solar wind.
Parker planned to get closer to the sun more than seven times that of previous spacecraft, reaching a speed of 690,000 km/h at closest approach.
Its instruments are protected from the sun by an 11.43-centimeter carbon composite shield, capable of withstanding temperatures reaching nearly 1,377°C.
It will continue to orbit the sun at this distance at least until 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 flow of charged particles constantly moving away from the sun.
