‘Uncharted Territory’: NASA Kicks Off Christmas With Record-Breaking Pass by the Sun
‘No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star,’ says one of the mission’s operators.
NASA is set to make history this Christmas Eve after attempting its nearest ever flyby of the sun.
The space agency’s Parker Solar probe was supposed to approach within 3.8 million miles of the sun’s surface, a record-breaking distance, at 6:53 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. During the approach, the probe will be out of contact with Earth “due to constraints on signal transmission” so close to the sun’s surface.
The probe is set to regain contact with Earth on December 27, when it will transmit a signal that will provide a “hint of its condition,” NASA said in a statement. It will report back with more data about its flyby at the end of January when it “reaches a position in its orbit with a clear view of Earth.”
“This is one example of NASA’s bold missions, doing something that no one else has ever done before to answer longstanding questions about our universe,” a program scientist at NASA, Arik Posner, said ahead of the scheduled flyby. “We can’t wait to receive that first status update from the spacecraft and start receiving the science data in the coming weeks.”
The solar probe can travel up to 430,000 miles per hour and can survive temperatures of up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, NASA said. The sun, at its surface, is measured to be 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
“No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory,” a mission operator at John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Nick Pinkine, said.
Since its launch six years ago, the solar probe has circled increasingly closer to the sun in its mission to help scientists discover more about the star at the center of this solar system, NASA said.
The Christmas Eve flyby will put the spacecraft “well within the corona, enabling Parker Solar Probe to conduct unrivaled scientific measurements with the potential to change our understanding of our closest star,” according to the agency. “When the spacecraft first passed into the solar atmosphere in 2021, it made unexpected findings about the boundary of the corona and imaged structures called coronal steamers, which previously had only been seen from afar.”
