NASA’s Parker probe came as close to the Sun as any human-made spacecraft on Tuesday

NASA’s Parker spacecraft came closer to the Sun than ever before, and was also the first to enter the Sun’s corona. (The outermost layer of the Sun’s atmosphere, consisting of plasma, has a temperature of about two million kelvins, and its material is extremely rare.) This means a distance of 6.1 million kilometers. The probe set another record, it was as fast as any other man-made device: it ran at a speed of 690,000 km/h. This would cover the distance from London to New York in less than half a minute. The energy for this was provided by the attraction of the Sun. “We did it, it was a moment. Parker has achieved its mission objective,” NASA science director Nicola Fox said in a video released by the space agency.

Due to its proximity to the Sun, it was not possible to establish contact with the probe on Tuesday, but before yesterday it had moved so far that its signals showed that it had survived the hot encounter, 980 degrees Celsius and extreme radiation.

Parker will send pictures and scientific data only from the beginning of January. “Until now, no man-made instrument has ever come this close to a star, so Parker will be sending data from a truly uncharted area,” explained mission operations director Nick Pinkine.

The Parker probe was launched in 2018 with the goal of getting inside the Sun’s corona to learn more about the star’s atmosphere in order to solve long-standing mysteries about the Sun, such as why the corona gets hotter the farther away it is. from the surface of the sun, and what accelerates the charged particles to the speed of light. When these particles reach the Earth’s magnetic field, the northern lights shine, but they can also cause problems in power supply, electronic and telecommunications equipment.

The Parker Solar Probe was developed as part of NASA’s Life with the Stars program, which studies the Sun-Earth relationship, which has a direct impact on our lives and societies. It was named after the founder of modern solar science, Eugene N. Parker, who died in 2022 at the age of 94. At the University of Chicago in the 1950s, he used mathematical methods to predict the existence of the solar wind and also discovered other basic knowledge about the workings of the Sun and the stars. . He was the first person to witness the launch of a spacecraft named after him.