Washington: NASA’s Parker Solar Probe aimed to make history on Tuesday by venturing deeper into the sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, in an ambitious mission to uncover secrets about Earth’s closest star.
“No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory,” said Nick Pinkine, mission operations manager at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in a NASA blog post.
At approximately 6:53 a.m. EST (1153 GMT), the spacecraft was set to reach within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun’s surface. However, due to the communication blackout during the close flyby, NASA will only confirm Parker’s condition on Friday.
Traveling at an astonishing speed of up to 430,000 mph (692,000 kph), the probe is designed to endure temperatures as high as 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius). This extreme environment is essential to collect unprecedented data about solar phenomena, NASA noted.
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The Parker Solar Probe first entered the solar atmosphere in 2021, revealing new insights into the sun’s atmospheric boundaries and capturing unique images of coronal streamers—cusp-like formations observable during solar eclipses.
Launched in 2018, the spacecraft has been steadily spiraling closer to the sun by leveraging Venus’s gravitational pull during flybys. One onboard instrument even captured visible light from Venus, offering researchers a novel way to study the planet’s surface through its dense cloud cover.
