NASA's spacecraft is getting closer to the sun with a man-made object – National
NASA said Friday that the Parker Solar Probe is “safe” and operating normally after successfully completing the closest approach to the Sun by any man-made object.
The spacecraft passed 3.8 million kilometers (6.1 million miles) from the sun's orbit on Dec. 24, is flying through the outer solar system called the corona, on a mission to help scientists learn more about the closest star to Earth.
The agency said a team working at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland received a signal, a tone of light, from the probe just before midnight on Thursday.
The spacecraft is expected to send detailed telemetry data about its position on Jan. 1, added NASA.
Traveling at speeds of up to 430,000 mph (692,000 kph), the spacecraft endures temperatures of up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius), according to NASA's website.
“This close study of the Sun allows the Parker Solar Probe to take measurements that help scientists better understand how material in this region is heated to millions of degrees, trace the origin of the solar wind (the continuous flow of material escaping from the Sun), and find out how energetic particles are accelerated to near the speed of light ,” the organization added.
Get daily world news
Get the day's top news, politics, economics, and current affairs, delivered to your inbox once a day.
“We are rewriting the literature on how the Sun works with the data from this investigation,” Dr. Joseph Westlake, NASA's director of heliophysics told Reuters.
“This work was theoretical in the Fifties,” he said, adding that “it's an amazing achievement to create technology that deepens our understanding of how the sun works.”
The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 and has been orbiting ever closer to the sun, using flybys of Venus to force it into a tight orbit with the sun.
Westlake said the team is preparing for more flybys in the extended phase of the mission, hoping to capture unique events.
-Reporting by Bipasha Dey, Shubham Kalia and Surbhi Misra in Bengaluru; Edited by Kate Mayberry
