With the spacecraft now gone, it will be Friday before the mission’s operators confirm its historic flight.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is expected to make a record-breaking flyby of the sun’s outer space, called the corona, in a mission to help scientists learn more about Earth’s closest star.
“No man-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will be sending data back to an unknown location,” Nick Pinkine, mission manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said on the US space agency’s website on Tuesday. .
Parker was on track to fly 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles) from the sun at 11:53 GMT on Tuesday. With the spacecraft now gone, it will be Friday before mission operators confirm its survival after a close flyby.
Traveling at speeds of up to 692,000km/h (430,000mph), fast enough to fly from Washington, DC, to Tokyo in less than one minute, the spacecraft will endure temperatures of up to 982 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees Fahrenheit), says the NASA website .
If the distance between the Earth and the sun were the length of a 100-yard (91.4-meter) American football field, the spacecraft should have been 4 meters (4.4 yards) from the end point at the closest time. path – known as perihelion.
When the probe first passed through the sun’s atmosphere in 2021, it gained new information about the boundaries of the sun’s atmosphere and collected close-up images of coronal streamers, the cusp-like structures seen during solar eclipses.
Since the spacecraft’s launch in 2018, the probe has been orbiting ever closer to the sun, using flybys of Venus to pull its gravitational pull into a tight orbit around our own solar system star.
One instrument in space captured light from Venus, giving scientists a new way to see deep clouds on Earth, NASA said.
By entering these extreme conditions, Parker has been helping scientists to face some of the biggest mysteries of the sun: how the solar wind develops, why the corona is hotter than the surface below and what coronal mass ejections – huge clouds of plasma that throw into space – are like. formed.
Tuesday’s flyby is the first of three record-breaking flybys and the next two – on March 22 and June 19 – are expected to return the probe to the same distance closer to the sun.
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