Rendezvous with the sun: Parker Solar Probe is healthy and has collected data
A few days ago, NASA's Parker Solar Probe raced past the sun at a distance of six million kilometers. Nothing happened to it.
(Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben)
One week after its record-breaking rendezvous with the sun, NASA's Parker Solar Probe has reported that all its instruments are operational and the entire space probe is functioning normally. The US space agency has now made this public. According to the report, telemetry data from the probe was received on Earth from January 1. This showed that the instruments functioned as planned and collected data during the closest flyby of a probe to the sun to date. As soon as the position and orientation of the solar probe are more favorable, it will begin sending this eagerly awaited measurement data to Earth later in January. Two more close flybys of the sun will follow later.
Under the protection of the heat shield
On Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe raced through the sun's atmosphere at a speed of 692,000 kilometers per hour, six million kilometers from its surface. No man-made object had ever come so close to our home star. The team responsible at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory assumes that the probe's heat shield withstood temperatures of almost 1000 degrees Celsius during the flyby. It is designed to withstand temperatures of up to 1430 degrees Celsius. Meanwhile, the measuring instruments directly behind it could work at "comfortable room temperature".
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Overall, the Parker Solar Probe will exceed all expectations and usher in a new golden era of space research, says project scientist Nour Rawafi. The probe was launched in mid-August 2018 and has been orbiting the sun in ever-closer orbits ever since. Directly from the sun's corona, one of its aims is to find out why this outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere, at several million degrees Celsius, is significantly hotter than the surface at around 5,000 degrees Celsius. It will also clarify how the particles of the solar wind are accelerated. In this way, it should also help to better protect our technology in the event of solar eruptions, for example. Further close flybys are planned for March and June.
(mho)
