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NASA said on Friday that it is Parker solar probe was “safe” and functioning normally after successfully completing the closest approach so far Sun any man-made object.
The spacecraft passed 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) from the sun’s surface on Dec. 24, flying into the sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona, on a mission to help scientists learn more about Earth’s nearest star.
The agency said the operations team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland received a signal, a beacon tone, from the probe shortly before midnight Thursday.
The spacecraft is expected to send detailed telemetry data about its status on Jan. 1, NASA added.
Traveling at speeds of up to 430,000 mph (692,000 km/h), the spacecraft endured temperatures of up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius), according to NASA’s website.
“This close-up study of the Sun allows the Parker Solar Probe to make measurements that help scientists better understand how material in this region is heated to millions of degrees, trace the origin of the solar wind (the continuous flow of material escaping the Sun), and discover how energetic particles are accelerated to close to the speed of light,” the agency added.
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“We are rewriting the textbooks on how the Sun works with the data from this probe,” Dr. Joseph Westlake, NASA Director of Heliophysics.
“This mission was theorized in the 1950s,” he said, adding that “it is an incredible achievement to create technologies that allow us to penetrate our understanding of how the sun works.”
The Parker Solar Probe launched in 2018 and is gradually orbiting the sun, using flybys of Venus to gravitationally pull it into a closer orbit with the sun.
Westlake said the team is preparing for even more flybys in the extended phase of the mission, hoping to capture unique events.
– Reporting by Bipasha Dey, Shubham Kalia and Surbhi Misra in Bengaluru; Editing by Kate Mayberry
