WASHINGTON: NASA’s pioneering Parker Solar Probe made history Tuesday, flying closer to the sun than any other spacecraft, with its heat shield exposed to scorching temperatures topping 930 degrees Celsius (1,700 degrees Fahrenheit).
Launched in August 2018, the spaceship is on a seven-year mission to deepen scientific understanding of our star and help forecast space-weather events that can affect life on Earth.
Tuesday’s historic flyby should have occurred at precisely 11:53 Greenwich Mean Time, although mission scientists will have to wait until Friday for confirmation as they lose contact with the craft for several days due to its proximity to the sun.
“Right now, Parker Solar Probe is flying closer to a star than anything has ever been before,” at 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles) away, NASA official Nicky Fox said in a video on social media Tuesday morning.
“It is just a total ‘yay, we did it,’ moment.”
If the distance between Earth and the sun is equivalent to the length of an American football field, 109.7 meters, the spacecraft should have been about four meters from the end zone at the moment of closest approach — known as perihelion.
“This is one example of NASA’s bold missions, doing something that no one else has ever done before to answer long-standing questions about our universe,” Parker Solar Probe program scientist Arik Posner said in a statement on Monday.
“We can’t wait to receive that first status update from the spacecraft and start receiving the science data in the coming weeks.”
So effective is the heat shield that the probe’s internal instruments remain near room temperature — around 29 C (85 F) — as it explores the sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona.
Parker will also be moving at a blistering pace of around 690,000 kilometers per hour (430,000 miles per hourph), fast enough to fly from the U.S. capital, Washington, to Japan’s Tokyo in under a minute.
“Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory,” said Nick Pinkine, mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
“We’re excited to hear back from the spacecraft when it swings back around the sun.”
By venturing into these extreme conditions, Parker has been helping scientists tackle some of the sun’s biggest mysteries: how solar wind originates, why the corona is hotter than the surface below, and how coronal mass ejections — massive clouds of plasma that hurl through space are formed.
The Christmas Eve flyby is the first of three record-setting close passes, with the next two — on March 22 and June 19, 2025 — both expected to bring the probe back to a similarly close distance from the Sun.