As the Parker Solar Probe gears up for a record-breaking fly-by of our sun, NASA experts have revealed the secrets of the historic mission.
The Parker Solar Probe will be closer to our sun than any other human-made object has before, coming within 3.86 million miles of the star on December 24.
In a live stream at 3:00 p.m. ET on December 17, scientists involved in the Parker Solar Probe mission discussed the upcoming close approach of our star, remarking that this mission is an astonishing achievement that could unveil the solar body’s mysteries.
[Parker Solar Probe] is an exploration mission by excellence… whatever observation we make is a potential discovery,” Nour Rawafi, an astrophysicist and the project scientist for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission, said in the livestream.
The Parker Solar Probe was launched on August 12, 2018, and is hoped to study the sun’s corona. On its way to this super-close orbit around the sun, the probe swung extremely close to Venus on November 6, coming within 233 miles of the planet’s surface.
The probe is now heading towards a tight orbit around the sun. The probe will break its own previous records for the closest approach of a spacecraft to our star, which it set as 4.51 million miles in 2023, and previously as 26.55 million miles in 2018. Before the Parker Solar Probe’s increasingly close swings, the closest spacecraft to the sun had been the Helios 2 spacecraft, which came about 27 million miles from the sun in 1976.
If the distance between the Earth and sun was the length of a football field, Parker would be around four yards from the end zone,” Joy Ng, multimedia lead at NASA, explained in the livestream.
NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben
In 2021, Parker flew through the sun’s corona, marking the first time in history that a spacecraft had come into contact with the sun’s atmosphere.
“On a mission to “touch the sun,” NASA’s Parker Solar Probe became the first spacecraft to fly through the corona—the sun’s upper atmosphere—in 2021,” NASA says on its website.
The probe used Venus as a gravity assist, propelling it closer toward the sun. As it neared the planet, the gravitational pull accelerated the spacecraft, increasing its speed, and when leaving the planet, the spacecraft “borrowed” some of the planet’s orbital momentum.
Can you spot Venus in the evening sky? If you do on Nov. 6, you’ll also be looking right at NASA’s Parker Solar Probe! 🛰️
On Wednesday, Parker makes its final Venus flyby, setting it up for its closest pass of the Sun on Dec. 24: pic.twitter.com/pA0JHsQMZZ
— NASA Sun & Space (@NASASun) November 4, 2024
The probe is currently soaring toward the sun at about 130,000 mph, according to NASA. Once Parker richest its closest orbit on Christmas Eve, it is expected to be traveling at around 430,000 miles per hour.
“That’s fast enough to get from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., in one second. This makes Parker the fastest human-made object in history, and it’s going to be an amazing achievement,” Ng said.
This mission will hopefully allow scientists to study the heating of the solar corona, as well as further our understanding of the origin and acceleration of the solar wind and the structure and dynamics of the sun’s magnetic fields.
“In this hyper-close regime, Parker will cut through plumes of plasma still connected to the sun. It is close enough to pass inside a solar eruption, like a surfer diving under a crashing ocean wave,” NASA said.
The probe is equipped with a 4.5-inch-thick heat shield made of a carbon-composite material, which can withstand temperatures up to 2,500 F while keeping the spacecraft instruments at a comfortable temperature, despite its proximity to our roiling star.
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