NASA probe tries to get closest to the sun at all | Space news

With communication with the spacecraft lost, it will be Friday before mission operators confirm its historic flight.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is expected to make history by flying into the Sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona, on a mission to help scientists learn more about Earth’s closest star.

“No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will actually be returning data from uncharted territory,” Nick Behnken, director of mission operations at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a NASA blog on Tuesday. .

Parker was on track to fly within 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles) of the sun’s surface at 11:53 GMT on Tuesday. With the loss of communication with the spacecraft, it will be Friday before mission operators confirm its health after the close flyby.

NASA said on its website that the spacecraft is moving at a speed of up to 692,000 kilometers per hour (430,000 miles per hour), which is fast enough to fly from Washington, D.C., to Tokyo in less than a minute, and will withstand temperatures of up to 982 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees). Fahrenheit). Website.

If the distance between Earth and the Sun is the length of a 100-yard (91.4 m) American football field, the spacecraft should be about 4 m (4.4 yd) from the end zone at the moment of its closest approach. Approach – known as perihelion.

When the probe first passed into the solar atmosphere in 2021, it found new details about the boundaries of the sun’s atmosphere and collected close-up images of coronal jets, ridge-like structures seen during a solar eclipse.

Since the spacecraft It was launched in 2018The probe was gradually orbiting closer to the Sun, using the flyby of Venus to pull it into a tighter orbit with our solar system’s star.

NASA said one of the instruments on board the spacecraft captured visible light from Venus, giving scientists a new way to see through the planet’s dense clouds to the surface below.

By venturing into these extreme conditions, Parker has helped scientists tackle some of the Sun’s biggest mysteries: how the solar wind originates, why the corona is hotter than the surface below, and how coronal mass ejections—huge clouds of plasma hurtling through space—are ejected. formed.

Tuesday’s flyby is the first of three record close passes, and is expected to return the next probes — on March 22 and June 19 — to a similar close distance to the sun.