In the early morning hours of Christmas Eve 2024, a NASA spacecraft plummeted through the Sun’s atmosphere at breakneck speed.
Equipped with a rugged heat shield, the Parker Solar Probe made its closest approach ever to the dynamic star, about 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from the star’s surface. That’s seven times closer than any other spacecraft. The mission is designed to fly into the sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, where many of the powerful solar storms and weather events that affect Earth occur.
To understand the behavior of our stars, the spacecraft needed to go where no spacecraft had gone before.
“It’s really exciting.” Nour Rao’afi, an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the mission’s project scientist, told Mashable. “The sun is like a laboratory for us.”
NASA announced that the spacecraft made its historic flyby on Christmas Eve, but the spacecraft is scheduled to arrive in position to send a beacon to Earth on December 27th and to ensure its safety.
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To accomplish this record-breaking passage, the nearly 10-foot-long spacecraft orbited the sun 22 times and was able to plummet deeper into the corona. While doing so, the spacecraft was continually increasing its speed. When the sun is repeatedly rocked by such a huge and highly gravitational object, it becomes a ball of hot gas. 333,000 times the mass As our planet you gain a lot of speed. There is nothing in the universe that can stop this movement.
During this flyby, the spacecraft reached speeds of about 430,000 miles per hour (692,000 kilometers per hour).
“This is the fastest man-made object in history.”
“It’s like going from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., in one second,” Lauafi marveled. “Interesting. It’s the fastest man-made object in history.”
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The spacecraft is equipped with rugged equipment to withstand such an extreme plunge into the corona. heat shield Designed to withstand strong solar radiation. The shield itself, which is 8 feet (2.4 meters) in diameter and 4.5 inches (approximately 12 centimeters) thick, gets hot to about 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, but just a few feet behind the shield, the environment is surprisingly comfortable. The equipment operates near room temperature.
Why Parker Solar Probe plummeted into the sun
In 2022, the spacecraft entered “one of the most powerful coronal mass ejections (CMEs) ever recorded.” NASA explained. CME is a phenomenon in which a mass of extremely hot gas (plasma) is ejected into space.
Lauafi hopes the same thing will happen again. (The chances are about the same because the sun is at its peak of activity, called solar maximum.)
When the sun releases a burst of energy and particles, the corona accelerates these particles. Such solar storms have a major impact not only on the energy grid and communication systems on Earth, but also on astronauts in space. Especially as NASA prepares to return astronauts to the moon and eventually beyond.
“That’s why we want to fly in the region where these particles are accelerated,” Lauafi said. “We want to understand how acceleration occurs.”
Parker Solar Probe Instruments.
Credit: Johns Hopkins University APL / NASA
The green line shows the Parker Solar Probe’s orbit around the sun since 2018. The green dot shows your location as of December 23, 2024.
Credit: Johns Hopkins University APL
Equipped with instruments to measure and image the solar wind, the constant stream of charged particles emitted by the corona, Parker Solar Probe researchers hope the spacecraft will help them determine when a strong CME or solar flare occurs. We hope that we will be able to more accurately predict where the attacks will occur.
For example, if a CME erupts from the surface of the Sun, it would have to travel more than 92 million miles to reach Earth. Along the way, this hot gas “builds up” the solar wind in front of it.
“That will affect the arrival time to Earth,” Lauafi explained. This knowledge of the mechanics of the universe is extremely important. If space weather forecasts are good, utilities could temporarily shut off power to avoid a power surge from the CME that could potentially knock out power to millions of people.
Infamously, in 1989, a CME associated with a powerful solar flare caused millions of people to lose power in Quebec, Canada. The CME collided with the Earth’s magnetic field on March 12 of that year, and NASA astronomer Sten Odenwald subsequently wrote, “Shortly after 2:44 a.m. on March 13, the Less than two days later, the power grid across Quebec was cut off, resulting in a power outage for the entire province of Quebec. During the hour power outage, millions of people were suddenly trapped and stranded in dark office buildings and underground pedestrian tunnels. elevator. ”The same solar event, 10 million dollars transformer At the Salem Nuclear Power Plant in New Jersey.
“I hope we see something that will surprise us quite a bit.”
Following this COVID-19 journey on Christmas Eve, the spacecraft will make two more trips in March and June 2025, which will take it to approximately the same distance to the sun. This is a true exploration into unknown territory, where scientists seek the unexpected.
“I hope we see something that will surprise us quite a bit,” Lauafi said.
