NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is about to make history again.
On Christmas Eve, the spacecraft will come closer to the sun than any man-made object has ever done, and travel faster than any man-made object has ever traveled.
On its 22nd short flight, the probe will skim just 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles) from the Sun’s surface, traveling at about 192 km per second.
NASA has received word from the spacecraft that all systems are operational and that Parker is where it needs to be for its daring dive on December 24 at 6:53 AM EST (December 23 at 11:53 UTC).
It will be the first of the probe’s final series of close flybys, known as perihelions, each of which will reach similar proximity and speed over the course of 2025 before Parker completes its mission.
“This is an example of NASA’s bold missions, where we’re doing something no one else has ever done before to answer long-standing questions about our universe,” said astronomer Arik Posner, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Program scientist. .
“We can’t wait to get that first status update from the spacecraft and get the science data in the coming weeks.”
Parker was launched in 2018 and has been making history ever since, breaking both proximity to solar energy and speed records.
The spacecraft is designed to give us the most accurate data ever obtained about the star the solar system orbits, as it plunges into the vast bubble of hot plasma that makes up the Sun’s atmosphere.
The probe’s measurements help scientists figure out how the sun works – something we don’t really have a good understanding of.
One of the greatest mysteries about the Sun is how the atmosphere that extends more than 5.2 million miles (8.3 million kilometers) into space is so much hotter than the Sun’s visible surface, known as the photosphere.
Another is that we don’t know how the magnetic field is generated deep within its interior; nor do we have any insight into what drives the solar cycles of activity. And there are some unresolved oddities about its chemical composition.
By sampling the solar corona and observing how the sun behaves at closer range, scientists hope Parker will give us information that will help us on the path to solving these mysteries.
But the December 24 flight will be a true test of Parker’s human ingenuity and capabilities.
“We’re actually almost landing on a star,” astrophysicist Nour Raouafi of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and Parker project scientist told BBC News last year. “This will be a monumental achievement for all humanity. This is equivalent to the 1969 moon landing.”
After perihelion, the probe will emit a beacon tone on December 27 to confirm its survival.
“No man-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly return data from uncharted territory,” said aerospace engineer Nick Pinkine, Parker Solar Probe Mission Operations Manager at the Applied Physics Laboratory. “We’re excited to hear from the spacecraft as it orbits back around the sun.”
Parker is scheduled to perform four more perihelions in 2025 at the same speed and distance from the Sun, currently scheduled for March 22 and June 19; and provisionally September 15 and December 12.
However, at some point the probe will run out of fuel to adjust its position to keep the components safely protected behind the carbon heat shield. And on that day, the probe will likely die in a blaze of glory, having bravely gone where no man-made instrument has gone before.
‘One day we will run out of fuel for the rocket engines that help us control the trajectory and the solar probe will no longer be able to compensate for the pressure of sunlight. The sun will turn us around and the entire back of the spacecraft should be burned up within seconds,” astrophysicist and Parker principal investigator Justin Kasper of the University of Michigan said in 2018.
‘The carbon heat shield, the Faraday cup and some other parts should be able to survive those high temperatures. So what you’ll essentially have is some kind of molten blob that will be in a ten-radius orbit – for the next billion years or so.”
Can’t stop, won’t stop.
