A NASA spacecraft may have made history by flying closer to the Sun than any other object sent before.
At 6:53 a.m. EST on Tuesday, the Parker Solar Probe was on course to pass about 6.1 million kilometers from the surface of the Sun.
However, NASA will not have contact with the probe for several days, meaning it will not know whether it survived the solar flyby until December 27, when Parker is expected to send another warning signal to confirm its health, NASA said. on your website.
“No man-made object has ever flown this close to a star, so Parker will truly be transmitting data from uncharted territory,” Nick Pinkine, operations manager for the Parker Solar Probe mission at APL, said on the NASA website.
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“We are excited to hear back from the spacecraft as it orbits the Sun.”
The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 to take a closer look at the sun. It has since passed straight through the sun's corona, the outer atmosphere visible during a total solar eclipse.
Its goal is to track energy flows, study how the solar corona heats up, and study what accelerates the solar wind.
Parker planned to approach the Sun more than seven times closer than previous spacecraft, reaching a speed of 690,000 km/h at maximum approach.
Its instruments are protected from the sun by an 11.43-centimeter carbon composite shield that can withstand temperatures of nearly 1,377°C.
It will orbit the Sun at this distance until at least September.
Scientists hope to better understand why the corona is hundreds of times hotter than the Sun's surface and what drives the solar wind, a supersonic stream of charged particles that constantly travels away from the Sun.