NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is alive!
Two days after a historic Christmas Eve solar flyby that flew closer to the star than any spacecraft in history — the car-sized spacecraft is ten times closer to the sun than Mercury — Parker Solar Probe Called home for the first time since encountering the sun. Just before midnight on Thursday (December 26), spacesent sent a simple but much-anticipated beacon tone to Earth.
Scientists on Earth have lost contact with the Parker Solar Probe since it began its autonomous flyby of Earth on December 20. sunso the signal is key confirmation NASA said in a statement that the spacecraft survived and was “in good health and operating normally” renew early Friday (December 27).
The statement said the mission control center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, received the signal just before midnight Eastern Time on December 26.
The Parker Solar Probe has called home! of. https://t.co/zbWT7iDVtPDecember 27, 2024
The spacecraft plans to send a more detailed status update home on New Year’s Day, January 1. Michael Buckley said it oversees Parker Solar Probe mission, told Space.com in an email. “This allows the team to better understand the overall health of the spacecraft and subsystems/instruments, including whether Parker’s data recorders are full.”
The probe should transmit most of its imagery and science data in late January, when it will be a safe distance from the sun.
Around 6:53 a.m. EDT (1153 GMT) on Christmas Eve, the spacecraft accomplished what it was designed to do: It hurtled to within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun’s surface. It travels at an astonishing speed of 430,000 mph (690,000 km/h) – breaking own personal best As the fastest object built by human hands.
It was just a total ‘Yeah! We did it’ moment,”
Nicola Fox, NASA deputy administrator for science
“This is truly a ‘Yay! We did it’ moment,” Nicola Fox, NASA’s associate administrator for science missions, said in a statement. video Updated on December 24th.
The fact that the spacecraft survived such a close pass of the sun is a testament to the mission team’s engineering, including a custom 4.5-inch-thick heat shield and autonomous systems that protect the probe from sunlight. the heat of the sun Simultaneously pointing it towards our star and allowing coronal material to contact the spacecraft. While the heat shield allows the spacecraft to withstand temperatures of up to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,371 degrees Celsius), the probe may ultimately experience lower (but still hot) temperatures of up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius), the mission team has previously said Pass.
“No man-made object has ever been so close to a star, so Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory,” Nick Pinkine, mission operations manager for the Parker Solar Probe at APL in Maryland, said in a report. Statement on December 20.
Since its launch in 2018, the Parker Solar Probe has helped Solve a long-standing mystery About our star, mainly why its outermost corona is affected Hundreds of times hotter The farther it is from the sun’s surface. On its way to the sun, the probe also accidentally captured a rare close-up of a passing comet, and revealed how Venus, Earth’s hellish twin, may be losing water.
Just before Christmas, scientists expect Parker to fly through a plume of plasma still attached to the sun. As turbulence continues to increase on the Sun’s surface, the mission team may also have observed different types of solar winds and solar storms told reporters earlier this month At the AGU Annual Meeting.
“We can’t wait to receive the first status updates from the spacecraft and begin receiving science data in the coming weeks,” Arik Posner, Parker Solar Probe program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement.