On Christmas Eve, NASA’s Parker solar probe will reach a milestone: it is expected to get closer to the sun than any other object created by man.
The probe, which weighs 50 kg, will travel at about 690,000 km/h while hovering at just 6.1 million kilometers from the surface. To do this, you will have to pass through huge columns of plasma.
This spacecraft, which is the fastest object ever built on Earth, will be lost during the mission. The operators of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland confirmed their status on December 27 after passing through there.
Program scientist Parker, Arik Posnersaid: “We are eager to receive that first status update from the spacecraft and begin receiving the scientific data in the coming weeks.”
The probe was launched in 2018. It is part of the program Living With a Star from NASA. Its main objective is to ‘touch’ the Sun. It has already circled the star more than 20 times while exploring the corona, its outermost and hottest layer. It is expected to reveal how life and society, including space weather and the solar wind, are affected by the Sun-Earth system.
This knowledge will help us learn about interactions with the Earth’s magnetic field and damage to satellites, and about how the northern lights become supercharged or electrical networks are interrupted.
The Christmas Eve flyby occurs toward the end of the mission, and is the first of the final three flybys. “No man-made object has never passed so close to a star“So Parker will really be sending us data from uncharted territory,” said Nick Pinkine, operations manager for the Parker Solar Probe mission at APL. “We’re excited to hear from the spacecraft when it circles the Sun again.” , says.
The mission is named after Eugene Parker, an American physicist who was active in the 1950s and who theorized about how stars emit energy. Part of his work included a theory about why the corona is hotter than the surface of the Sun itself, contrary to expectations. He died at age 94 in 2022.
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