NASA spacecraft makes closest-ever approach to sun by human-made object – National

NASA said on Friday that her Parker Solar Probe was “safe” and operate normally after successfully completing the closest ever approach to the Sun by any human-made object.

The spacecraft passed 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) from the Sun’s surface on December 24, flying into the Sun’s outer atmosphere called the corona, on a mission to help scientists learn more about the nearest star to the earth.

The agency said the operations team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland received the signal, a beacon tone, from the probe just before midnight on Thursday.

The spacecraft is expected to send detailed telemetry data about its status on January 1, NASA added.

Moving at up to 430,000 mph (692,000 kph), the spacecraft endured temperatures of up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius), according to NASA’s website.

1:54
NASA probe travels to Sun set to break records: ‘Total ‘Yay, we did it’ moment’

“This close-up study of the Sun allows Parker Solar Probe to take measurements that help scientists better understand how material in this region is heated to millions of degrees, trace the origin of the solar wind (a continuous flow of material which escapes the Sun) , and discover how energetic particles are accelerated to near light speed,” the agency added.

Get daily National news

Get the day’s top news, political, economic and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day.

“We are writing the textbooks on how the sun works with the data from this probe,” said Dr. Joseph Westlake, NASA’s heliophysics director to Reuters.

“This mission was theorized in the 1950s,” he said, adding that it is a “tremendous achievement to create technologies that allow us to deepen our understanding of how the sun works.”

The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 and has been steadily moving closer to the Sun, using flybys of Venus to gravitationally pull it into a tighter orbit with the Sun.

Westlake said the team is preparing for even more flybys during the extended mission phase, hoping to capture unique events.

-Reporting by Bipasha Dey, Shubham Kalia and Surbhi Misra in Bengaluru; Editing by Kate Mayberry