(Reuters) – NASA said on Friday its Parker Solar Probe was “safe” and operating normally after successfully completing the closest mission ever to the sun for a man-made object.
On December 24, just 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from the sun’s surface, the spacecraft flew 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 an operations team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland received a beacon tone from the detector just before midnight Thursday.
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NASA added that the spacecraft is expected to send detailed telemetry data on its status on January 1.
The spacecraft traveled at speeds of up to 430,000 mph (692,000 km/h) and withstood temperatures as high as 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius), according to NASA’s website.
“This close study of the Sun enables the Parker Solar Probe to make measurements that help scientists better understand how material in this region is heated to millions of degrees and track the origins of the solar wind (the continuous flow of material escaping the Sun). , and discover how high-energy particles accelerate to nearly the speed of light,” the agency added.
The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 and has gradually moved closer to the sun, using Venus’s gravitational pull to pull it into a closer orbit with the sun.
(Reporting by Bipasha Dey and Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru; Editing by Kate Mayberry)
