NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has traveled to within just 3.86 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun’s surface — a new record — on Christmas Eve.
In one of humankind’s most impressive feats of space exploration, Tuesday, Dec. 24 saw a heavily armored NASA spacecraft — no bigger than a small car — became the closest human-made object to the sun in history. It also saw humanity’s closest-ever approach to a star and the fastest-ever human-made object break its speed record.
Monumental Feat
This monumental feat of exploration occured at 11:53 UTC (6:53 a.m. EST) on Tuesday, Dec. 24, as Parker conducted an unprecedented close flyby of the sun, reaching just 3.86 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from its surface. It was its 22nd close approach to the sun.
At 96% of the distance between the sun and Earth — well within the orbit of Mercury at about 39% — it is the closest any human-made object has ever been to the sun.
Dr. Nour Raouafi, the project’s scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, equates this mission’s significance to the moon landing in 1969. “It’s the moment we have been waiting for for nearly 60 years,” he said during a media roundtable at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting on Dec. 10, 2024. “In 1969, we landed humans on the moon. On Christmas Eve, we embrace a star — our star.”
‘Hyper-Close’
In what NASA calls a “hyper-close regime,” Parker will cut through plumes of plasma still connected to the sun and be close enough to pass inside a solar eruption, “like a surfer diving under a crashing ocean wave,” according to NASA.
The heat that Parker will be subjected to when as its closest to the sun was “nearly 500 times the hottest summer day we can witness on Earth,” said Raouafi.
Parker was already the fastest object ever built on Earth, but as it reached its closest point to the sun, Parker will go one further by traveling at 430,000 mph (690,000 kph), breaking its records for speed and distance. According to the mission’s website, that’s fast enough to get from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., in one second.
Mission operators at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland will lose contact with the probe for three days and wait for a beacon tone on Dec. 27, 2024, that will confirm its survival.
Parker will complete two more hyper-close passes at the same distance on March 22 and June 19, 2025.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
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