NASA’s probe is expected to make history by making its closest approach to the sun

A NASA spacecraft may have made history, flying closer to the sun than any object ever sent before.

The Parker Solar Probe was on track to fly about 6.1 million kilometers from the sun’s surface on Tuesday at 6:53 a.m. ET.

But NASA will be out of contact with the probe for a few days, meaning it won’t know if it survived its close pass until Dec. 27, when Parker is scheduled to transmit another beacon tone to confirm its health, NASA said. On its website.

“No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will actually be returning data from uncharted territory,” Nick Behnken, APL’s Parker Solar Probe mission operations manager, said on NASA’s website.

“We’re excited to hear the spacecraft’s response as it swings back around the sun.”

The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 to take a close-up look at the Sun. Since then, it has flown directly through the sun’s corona – the outer atmosphere that can be seen during a total solar eclipse.

Its purpose is to track the flow of energy, study the heating of the solar corona and explore what accelerates the solar wind.

Parker plans to approach the Sun more than seven times faster than previous spacecraft, reaching a speed of 690,000 kilometers per hour on closest approach.

Its tools are protected from the sun by a 11.43cm carbon composite shield, which can withstand temperatures of up to approximately 1377 degrees Celsius.

It will continue to orbit the sun at this distance until at least September.

Scientists hope to better understand why the corona is hundreds of times hotter than the Sun’s surface, and what drives the solar wind, a supersonic stream of charged particles constantly shooting away from the Sun.