NASA said Friday that its Parker Solar Probe is “safe” and operating normally after it successfully completed the closest approach to the sun by any man-made object.
The spacecraft passed 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from the sun’s surface on December 24, and flew into the sun’s outer atmosphere called the corona, on a mission to help scientists learn more about the nearest star to Earth.
The agency said that the operations team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland received the signal, a beacon tone, from the probe just before midnight on Thursday.
NASA added that the spacecraft is expected to send detailed telemetry data about its condition on January 1.
The spacecraft is moving at speeds of up to 430,000 miles per hour (692,000 kilometers per hour) and has endured temperatures of up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius), according to NASA’s website.
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“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, and trace the origin of the solar wind (a continuous flow of material escaping from the Sun).” The agency added, discovering how to accelerate energetic particles to a speed close to the speed of light.
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“We are rewriting the textbooks on how the Sun works with the data from this probe,” Dr. Joseph Westlake, NASA’s director of heliophysics, told Reuters.
“This mission was theorized in the 1950s,” he said, adding that it is “an amazing achievement to have created technologies that allow us to delve deeper into our understanding of how the Sun works.”
Launched in 2018, the Parker Solar Probe is gradually orbiting closer to the sun, using a flyby of Venus to pull it into a tighter orbit with the sun.
Westlake said the team is preparing for more flybys in the extended mission phase, in hopes of capturing unique events.
Reporting by Bipasha Dey, Shubham Kalia and Surbhi Misra in Bengaluru. Reporting by Muhammad. Edited by Kate Mayberry
