NASA said on Friday that its Parker Solar Probe was “safe” and operating normally after successfully completing the closest approach ever. the sun of any man-made object.
The spacecraft passed 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from the sun's surface on Dec. 24, flying through the sun's outer atmosphere known as the corona, helping scientists learn more about the closest star to Earth. On a mission to help.
The operations team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland received a signal, a beacon tone, from the probe shortly before midnight Thursday, the agency said.
The spacecraft is expected to send detailed telemetry data about its position on January 1, NASA added.
According to NASA's website, the spacecraft, traveling at speeds of 430,000 mph (692,000 km/h), endured temperatures of up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius).
“This close study of the Sun allows the Parker Solar Probe to make measurements that help scientists better understand how the material in this region is heated to millions of degrees, the origin of the solar wind. detect (the continuous flow of material from the Sun), and discover how energetic particles are accelerated to near the speed of light,” the agency added.
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“We're rewriting the textbooks on how the Sun works with data from this probe,” Dr. Joseph Westlake, NASA's director of heliophysics, told Reuters.
“This mission was envisioned in the fifties,” he said, adding that it was “an amazing feat to create technologies that will advance our understanding of how the Sun works.” Allowed.”
The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 and is slowly orbiting the Sun, using the flybys of Venus to pull it into a tight orbit with the Sun.
Westlake said the team is preparing for even more flybys in the extended mission phase, hoping to capture unique events.
Reporting by Bipasha Dey, Shubham Kalia and Surbhi Mishra in Bengaluru; Edited by Kate Mayberry