NASA spacecraft makes closest approach to sun by man-made object – National

NASA said on Friday that it did Parker solar probe was “safe” and operated normally after successfully completing the closest approach ever to the alone for any man-made object.

The spacecraft passed within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) of the sun’s surface on December 24, flying into the sun’s outer atmosphere called the corona, on a mission to help scientists learn about more about the nearest star to Earth.

The agency said the operations team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland received the signal, a beacon tone, from the probe shortly before midnight Thursday.

The spacecraft is expected to send back detailed telemetry data about its status on Jan. 1, NASA added.

Speeding 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 Parker Solar Probe to take measurements that will help scientists better understand how the material in this region is heated to millions of degrees, trace the origin of the solar wind (a continuous flow of material escaping from the Sun), and discovers how energetic particles are accelerated to the speed of light,” the agency added.

trending now

• 6,000 inmates escaped from a high security prison in Mozambique. what to know

• Donald Trump says he urged Wayne Gretzky to run for prime minister

“We’re rewriting the textbooks on how the Sun works with the data from this probe,” Dr. Joseph Westlake, NASA’s director of heliophysics, told Reuters.

“This mission was theorized in the 1950s,” he said, adding that it is “an incredible achievement to create technologies that allow us to deepen our understanding of how the sun works.”

The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 and has been gradually moving closer to 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 mission phase, hoping to capture unique events.

–Reporting by Bipasha Dey, Shubham Kalia and Surbhi Misra in Bangalore; Edited by Kate Mayberry