NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is poised to achieve a monumental milestone by flying into the sun’s outer atmosphere, known as the corona. This pivotal mission is designed to enhance our understanding of Earth’s closest star, providing invaluable data that has not been accessible until now.
According to Nick Pinkine, mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, no human-made object has ventured this close to a star before. This unprecedented journey, scheduled for 11:53 GMT, involves the Parker Solar Probe traveling a remarkable distance of 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles) from the sun’s surface. As the spacecraft temporarily loses communication, mission operators anticipate confirming its operational status by Friday following the historic flyby.
The Parker Solar Probe is traveling at astonishing speeds, reaching up to 692,000 kilometers per hour (430,000 miles per hour). To put this speed into perspective, the probe could cover the distance from Washington, D.C., to Tokyo in under a minute. This mission is remarkable not only for its speed but also for the extreme conditions the probe will encounter, including temperatures soaring to 982 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees Fahrenheit).
To visualize the proximity of this mission, if the distance from Earth to the sun were scaled to the length of a 100-yard (91.4-meter) American football field, the probe would be positioned just 4 meters (4.4 yards) from the end zone at the moment of its closest approach, termed perihelion.
Previously, during its inaugural passage into the solar atmosphere in 2021, the Parker Solar Probe revealed groundbreaking insights about the sun’s atmospheric boundaries, capturing detailed images of coronal streamers, structures reminiscent of the arcs seen during solar eclipses. Launched in 2018, the probe has gradually maneuvered closer to the sun using gravitational assists from Venus.
One of the onboard instruments successfully recorded visible light from Venus, enabling scientists to penetrate the planet’s dense cloud cover to explore its surface. As the Parker Solar Probe navigates these extreme conditions, it plays a crucial role in solving some of science’s most profound mysteries regarding solar wind production, the reasons behind the corona’s higher temperatures compared to the sun’s surface, and the formation of coronal mass ejections—massive clouds of plasma released into space.
This flyby marks the first of three record-setting close passes, with the next two set for March 22 and June 19, further propelling the probe’s journey into uncharted solar territory.
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