Parker Solar Probe – NASA
NASA’s mission to “touch” the Sun has endured another incredible milestone. On December 24, 2024, the Parker Solar Probe braved a record-breaking close encounter with our star, soaring through the solar atmosphere at a blistering 430,000 miles per hour—faster than any object ever created by humans—and coming within just 3.8 million miles of the Sun’s surface. Confirmation of the spacecraft’s safe passage and normal operation arrived via a beacon tone on December 26.
This pass, the first of more to come at this distance, allows the spacecraft to conduct unrivaled scientific measurements with the potential to change our understanding of the Sun, explained NASA.
“Flying this close to the Sun is a historic moment in humanity’s first mission to a star,” said Nicky Fox, who leads the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “By studying the Sun up close, we can better understand its impacts throughout our solar system, including on the technology we use daily on Earth and in space, as well as learn about the workings of stars across the universe to aid in our search for habitable worlds beyond our home planet.”
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“Parker Solar Probe is braving one of the most extreme environments in space and exceeding all expectations,” said Nour Rawafi, the project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), which designed, built, and operates the spacecraft from its campus in Laurel, Maryland. “This mission is ushering a new golden era of space exploration, bringing us closer than ever to unlocking the Sun’s deepest and most enduring mysteries.”
On a mission to “touch the Sun,” NASA’s Parker Solar Probe became the first spacecraft to fly through the corona – the Sun’s upper atmosphere – in 2021. With every orbit bringing it closer, the probe faces brutal heat and radiation to provide humanity with unprecedented observations, visiting the only star we can study up close.
To conduct its groundbreaking research, the Parker Solar Probe and its instruments are protected by a 4.5-inch (11.43 cm) carbon-composite shield designed to withstand temperatures of nearly 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,377 Celsius).
Parker Solar Probe was developed as a part of NASA’s Living With a Star program to explore aspects of the Sun-Earth system that directly affect life and society. The Living With a Star program is managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. APL manages Parker Solar Probe for NASA and designed, built and operates the mission.
The mission is named for the late Dr. Eugene N. Parker, who pioneered our modern understanding of the Sun. As a young professor at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s, Parker developed a mathematical theory that predicted the solar wind, the constant outflow of solar material from the Sun. Throughout his career, Parker revolutionized the field time and again, advancing ideas that addressed the fundamental questions about the workings of our Sun and stars throughout the universe.
