NASA's spacecraft flew closer to the sun on Christmas Eve than any other spacecraft in history, circling at incredible speeds and becoming the fastest spacecraft in human history.
Just before 7 a.m. on Dec. 24, the Parker Solar Probe passed within 3.8 million miles of the Sun's surface. It got seven times closer to a burning ball of gas than any other mission. According to the New York Times.
It rocketed through space at a record-breaking 430,000 miles per hour, avoiding the corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, the paper said.
This broke the spacecraft's own speed record, making it the fastest human-built spacecraft.
The close encounter is the culmination of a six-year mission that has brought the Parker spacecraft closer and closer to the Sun during some 24 previous flights that have revealed new information about the object.
It also discovered and photographed comets, furthering our knowledge of nearby Venus.
“This is a voyage of discovery,” Nicki Fox, deputy administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, told the Times.
“We're really stepping into the unknown. Nothing has ever flown through a star's atmosphere, and no other mission will for a long time.”
The spacecraft's heat shield, which protects the machine from temperatures of about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, also held up better than scientists expected as it approached previously unexplored stellar regions, the newspaper said.
“The mission is progressing very well and we feel it's much better than we designed it to be,” Noor Rawafy, a project scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory, told the Times.
“But it's still a very high-risk mission. Anything can happen at any time.”
The spacecraft is currently looking for information about the solar wind emanating from the Sun during its solar maximum, or most active state.
The mission has already discovered intriguing new secrets about the life-giving star, a 4.5 billion-year-old ball of hydrogen and helium that is about halfway through its lifespan.
These include the discovery of the magnetic switchbacks that drive the solar wind, and the discovery of dust-free zones near stars that were predicted almost a century ago.
The NASA team that launched the spacecraft in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory hopes it will give it a front-row seat to the holiday fireworks explosion.
“It would be great if the Sun could produce a huge explosion, like a coronal mass ejection, when the Parker Solar Probe got very close to the Sun,” Rawafi said.
The spacecraft will be lights out until Dec. 27, after which it will send another message to Earth to confirm it is still flying, the Times said.
It will then send back information about the coronavirus outbreak over the coming months.
Two more close-bys are planned for next year, but Parker will never get any closer than it is now.
The spacecraft is named after solar physicist Eugene Parker, who predicted the existence of the solar wind in the 1950s.
He oversaw the spacecraft's launch in 2018, and died four years later at the age of 94, the Times reported.
