NASA solar probe -survived its closest access to the Sun

NASA’s solar Sonda Sonda Skiming the sun on Christmas Eve and lived to tell the tale.

The heat -strengthened spaceship made its nearest solar flight still at 6:53 am EST on December 24th. It came within 6.1 million kilometers of the Sun’s surface, beating its own record of 2023 of 7.26 million kilometers.

At the time of the nearest approach, the spaceship was also the fastest object ever made by humans. She shook around the sun at about 692,000 kilometers per hour – as fast as to travel from Philadelphia to Washington, DC, in about a second.

This flight was the roof of six years in space for the investigation. Parker began in 2018 on a mission to study the exterior atmosphere of the sun, or Corona, from the inside. Due to the extraordinary gravity of the sun, the craft could not directly aim at its destination. From the beginning, it has been swinging around Venus and using the gravity of the planet to gradually its orbit closer to the Sun, making 21 more and closer flights along the way.

The last Flyby of Venus, on November 6, finally sent Parker to his optimal orbit: close enough to study the sun’s processes in intimate details, but not as close as those processes destroy it.

The spaceship was out of contact with the Earth for about a week as it approached the sun. Shortly before midnight on December 27, scientists received a beacon signal confirming that the spaceship survived the meeting.

“Parker Solar Probe has called home!” NASA announced in a post on X at 12:01 am est.

More data on Parker’s status arrived on January 1, indicating that the spaceship was healthy and able to obtain scientific data during the flight. The probe will begin to transmit that data later this month, when it is in a better position to communicate with the land.

The new orbit will last at least for the next nine months. Parker will make two more flights at this distance in March and June before his primary mission in September 2025 is completed.