This image made available by NASA shows an artist’s rendering of the Parker Solar Probe as it approaches the Sun.
Steve Gribbin/AP/Johns Hopkins APL/NASA
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Steve Gribbin/AP/Johns Hopkins APL/NASA
Icarus may be best known in Greek mythology as the person who flew too close to the sun. But today, it is 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 miles of the sun’s surface, marking humanity’s closest approach ever.
To put it in perspective, NASA’s probe was about 10 times closer to the parent star than the orbit of the innermost planet, Mercury.
While flying around the sun, Parker also set a record for the fastest man-made object, reaching an astonishing speed of 430,000 miles per hour, 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 intense heat and radiation like no spacecraft before. Scientists will not know whether Parker survived or his condition until Friday, when he is expected to send his first signal to Earth since his flight.
“He broke all these records, and he’s just, ‘Hey! We did it!” Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said at a press conference: video On December 24th.
Parker was launched in 2018 as part of an unprecedented mission to study the Sun. The goal is to better understand ancient 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 produce stunning, widespread auroras, but also pose a threat to power grids and radio signals.
For the past six years, Parker has been venturing 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 transmitting data collected during its flyby of the sun at the end of January.
“Until recently, we didn’t have the technology. In 2018, everything changed with the launch of the Parker Solar Probe,” said Nour Rawafi, project scientist for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). ), he explained on the TED Radio Hour earlier this month.
“It revolutionized our understanding of the sun,” he added.
Parker is equipped with a special heat shield that reflects light, absorbs heat, and is cooled by a network of tubes filled with water, according to Rawafi.
This design helps keep the probe’s interior close to room temperature, even while inside the Sun’s outer atmosphere, which can range 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 attend the launch of the rocket that sent the probe into space. He died in 2022 at the age of 94.
