NASA said Friday that its Parker solar probe was “safe” and operating normally after achieving the closest approach ever to the Sun by any man-made object.
The spacecraft passed 6.1 million miles from the solar surface on Dec. 24, flying into the sun’s outer atmosphere called the corona, on a mission to help scientists learn more about the closest star to Earth.
The agency said the operations team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland received the signal, a beacon tone, from the probe just before midnight Thursday.
The spacecraft is expected to send detailed telemetry data on its status on January 1, NASA added.
Traveling up to 430,000 mph (692,000 km/h), the spacecraft endured temperatures of up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius), according to NASA’s website.
“This close study of the Sun allows Parker Solar Probe to take measurements that help scientists better understand how matter in this region is heated to millions of degrees, and to trace the origin of the solar wind (a flux continuous flow of matter escaping from 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 data from this probe,” Dr. Joseph Westlake, NASA’s director of heliophysics, told Reuters.
“This mission was theorized in the 1950s,” he said, adding that it was “an incredible achievement to create technologies that allow us to deepen our understanding of how the sun works.”
The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 and has gradually moved closer to the sun, using flybys of Venus to gravitationally pull it into a closer orbit with the sun.
Westlake said the team is preparing for even more flybys during the extended mission phase, hoping to capture unique events.
–Reporting by Bipasha Dey, Shubham Kalia and Surbhi Misra in Bengaluru; Editing by Kate Mayberry
