Nasa solar probe to make its closest ever pass of sun on Christmas Eve
Nasa’s Parker solar probe is about to make its closest ever flyby of the sun, passing 3.8m miles from its surface on Christmas Eve.
The mission team will lose contact with their ship until Friday 27 December, when they are due to receive a “beacon tone”. On 20 December, they received a transmission indicating everything was operating normally, via Nasa’s Deep Space Network complex in Canberra, Australia.
The Parker probe was launched in August 2018 on a seven-year mission to deepen scientific understanding of the sun, as well as helping to forecast space weather events that can impact life on Earth. It is named after Eugene Parker, who pioneered scientific understanding of the sun and died in 2022 at the age of 94.
“No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory,” Nick Pinkine, the probe’s mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said in a statement. “We’re excited to hear back from the spacecraft when it swings back around the sun.”
While the 3.8m mile distance may sound far away, the probe will be in the sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona. If the 93m mile distance between Earth and the sun’s surface was 100 metres, the spacecraft would be 4 metres away at its closest point.
