A Nasa spacecraft is in “good health” after going closer to the Sun than anything ever has, the space agency has said.
The Parker Solar Probe appears to have successfully completed a journey to within 3.8 million miles of the Sun’s surface as part of its mission to explore the still mysterious processes that power it.
It succeeded in that journey, with the spacecraft successfully withstanding temperatures up to 983C and flying by the Sun at 430,000 miles per hour, Nasa said. The Parker Solar Probe is also the fastest thing ever made on Earth.
Nasa said the mission operations team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, received the signal on Boxing Day evening.
The spacecraft is expected to send back detailed data about its condition and experiences on January 1.
Nasa said: “Following its record-breaking closest approach to the sun, Nasa’s Parker Solar Probe has transmitted a beacon tone back to Earth indicating it’s in good health and operating normally.”
Scientists hope the mission will allow them to measure how material is heated to millions of degrees, find where solar wind comes from and learn how energetic particles reach near light speeds.
Since the spacecraft launched in 2018, it has circled gradually closer to the sun – flying past Venus in order to use the planet’s gravity to move it into a tighter orbit.
When it first passed into the sun’s atmosphere in 2021, the probe made unexpected discoveries about the boundary of the corona.
Additional reporting by agencies
