Once the spacecraft loses contact, it will be Friday before mission operators confirm the 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 come this close to the star, so Parker will return data from truly uncharted territory,” Nick Pinkin, mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a U.S. space agency blog Tuesday. .
Parker was scheduled to fly 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles) from the sun’s surface at 11:53 GMT on Tuesday. With the spacecraft out of contact, it will be Friday before mission operators can check its status after the flyby.
It travels at speeds of up to 692,000 km/h (430,000 mph), fast enough to fly from Washington D.C. to Tokyo in less than a minute, and can withstand temperatures up to 982 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees Fahrenheit), NASA said. Yes. website.
If the distance between the Earth and the Sun is equal to the length of a 100-yard (91.4 m) football field, then the spacecraft should be about 4 m (4.4 m) from the end zone at its closest moment. Approach – known as perihelion.
When the probe passed through the Sun’s atmosphere for the first time in 2021, it discovered new details about the boundary of the Sun’s atmosphere and collected close-up images of coronal flags, cusp-shaped structures visible during solar eclipses.
Since its launch in 2018, the probe has used a flyby of Venus to gradually orbit closer to the sun, pulling it gravitationally into a tighter orbit with the solar system’s star.
NASA said an instrument aboard the spacecraft has captured visible light from Venus, giving scientists a new way to see through the planet’s thick clouds to the surface below.
By exploring these extreme conditions, Parker will help scientists uncover some of the sun’s biggest mysteries, such as how the solar wind is generated, why the corona is hotter than the surface below, and how coronal mass ejections, massive clouds of plasma that move through space, occur. Helped me solve it. has been formed.
Tuesday’s flyby is the first of three record-breaking flybys in which the probe is expected to return to a similarly close distance from the Sun, with the next two on March 22 and June 19.
