The spacecraft won't make contact, it will be Friday before mission operators confirm its flight history.
NASA's Parker Solar Probe is expected to make history by flying through the sun's atmosphere, known as the corona, with the goal of helping scientists learn more about the closest star to Earth.
“No man-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will definitely return information from an uncharted region,” Nick Pinkine, a project manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a US space agency blog on Tuesday. .
Parker was on a flyby 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles) from the sun at 11:53 GMT on Tuesday. The spacecraft will not rendezvous, it will be Friday before the mission crew can confirm its health after the close flyby.
Traveling at a speed of 692,000km/h (430,000mph), fast enough to fly from Washington, DC, to Tokyo in less than a minute, the spacecraft will withstand temperatures of up to 982 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees Fahrenheit), NASA said. website.
If the distance between the Earth and the sun was the length of a 100-yard (91.4-meter) American football field, the spacecraft would have been about 4 meters (4.4 yards) from the end point at its closest approach. path – called perihelion.
After the probe passed through space in 2021, it discovered new information about the boundary of the solar system and collected close-up images of the coronal streamers, the cusp-like structures seen in eclipses.
Since the spacecraft was launched in 2018the probe has been slowly orbiting the sun, using Venus flybys to pull it into a tight orbit with our planet's star.
One instrument on the spacecraft captured light from Venus, giving scientists a new way to look at Earth's clouds down to Earth, NASA said.
By diving into these difficult conditions, Parker has been helping scientists solve the biggest mysteries of the sun: how the solar wind starts, why the corona is hotter than the surface and how coronal mass ejections – huge clouds of plasma that cross the atmosphere – start. made.
Tuesday's flyby is the first of three closest flybys while the next two – on March 22 and June 19 – are expected to bring the probe further away from the sun.