Mission operators will confirm its historic flyby on Friday after the spacecraft lost contact.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is expected to make history by flying into the Sun’s outer atmosphere, known as the corona, on a mission to help scientists learn more about Earth’s nearest star.

“No man-made object has ever been so close to a star, so Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory,” Nick Pinkin, mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a NASA blog post on Tuesday.

At 11:53 GMT on Tuesday, Parker is scheduled to fly 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles) above the sun’s surface. Since contact with the spacecraft was lost, mission operators will confirm its health after a close flyby on Friday.

NASA said on its website that the spacecraft will move at speeds of up to 692,000 kilometers per hour (430,000 mph), enough to fly from Washington, D.C., to Tokyo in one minute, and will withstand temperatures of up to 982 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature. website.

If the distance between the Earth and the Sun was equivalent to the length of a 100-yard (91.4-meter) American football field, the spacecraft would be approximately 4 meters (4.4 yards) from the end zone at its closest approach. Approach – called perihelion.

When the probe first entered the Sun’s atmosphere in 2021, it discovered new details about the boundaries of the Sun’s atmosphere and collected close-up images of coronal streamers and spikes seen during a solar eclipse.

Since the spacecraft Launched in 2018Since then, the probe has gradually moved closer to the sun, using Venus’s gravitational pull to pull it into a closer orbit with the solar system’s stars.

An instrument on the spacecraft captured visible light from Venus, giving scientists a new way to see the planet’s surface through its thick clouds, NASA said.

By venturing into these extreme conditions, Parker has been helping scientists solve some of the sun’s biggest mysteries: how the solar wind is generated, why the corona is hotter than the surface below, and what causes coronal mass ejections (massive clouds of plasma that fly through space) How did it come about? form.

Tuesday’s flyby is the first of three record-breaking close flybys, with the next two (March 22 and June 19) expected to bring the probe back as close to the sun.