NASA spacecraft just plunged into the sun and broke stunning records

At the beginning of Christmas Eve in 2024, a NASA The craft flew at lightning speed through the sun’s atmosphere.

U Parker Solar Probeequipped with a robust heat shield, it made the closest approach to our dynamic star, coming to about 3.8 million kilometers (6.1 million miles) from the stellar surface. It is seven times closer than any other probe. The mission is designed to fly into the sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, which generates many powerful solar storms and the climate they impact. Earth.

To understand the behavior of our star, a mission had to go where a mission had not gone before.

“It’s really exciting,” Nour Raouafi, an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and project scientist for the mission, told Mashable. “The sun is like a laboratory for us.”

Although NASA announced that the craft made the historic flyby on Christmas Eve, the probe will be in a position to send a beacon tone to Earth on December 27, which will confirm its safety.

To make this record step, the nearly 10-foot-long probe made 22 orbits around the sunwhich allows them to plant deeper and deeper in the crown. And while doing so, the spacecraft continued to pick up speed. When you bounce repeatedly from such a massive and powerful gravitational object – the sun is a ball of hot gas 333,000 times more massive like our planet – you will accumulate a lot of speed. Out in spacethere is nothing that prevents this movement.

In this close flyby, the probe reached about 430,000 miles per hour (692,000 kilometers per hour).

“It’s the fastest human-made object ever.”

“It’s like going from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. in a second,” marveled Raouafi. “It’s fascinating. It’s the fastest man-made object ever.”

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The spacecraft can survive such an extreme immersion in the corona because it is equipped with a robust heat shield designed to withstand intense solar radiation. The shield itself, which is eight feet (2.4 meters) in diameter and 4.5 inches (almost 12 centimeters) thick, heats to about 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, but only a couple of feet behind the shield, the surrounding they are surprisingly pleasant. The instruments operate at room temperature.

Why Parker Solar Probe swooped into the sun

In 2022, the probe will fly into “one of the most powerful coronal mass ejections (CME) never registered,” NASA explained. A CME is the eruption of a mass of super hot gas (plasma) into space.

Raouafi hopes it will happen again. (The sun is at its peak activity, called the maximum of the sun, because the chances are as good as it is.)

When the sun releases a burst of energy and particles, the corona accelerates these particles. Such solar storms have huge implications for our energy networks and communication systems on Earth, as well as for astronauts in space – especially as NASA prepares to return astronauts to the moonand eventually, beyond.

“That’s why we want to fly through the regions where these particles are accelerated,” said Raouafi. “We want to understand how the acceleration occurs.”

Parker Solar Probe researchers hope that the spacecraft, equipped with instruments to measure and image the solar wind (a constant stream of charged particles emanating from the corona), will allow us to better predict when and where a powerful CME or. solar flare it can hit.

For example, when a CME erupts from the surface of the Sun, it must travel more than 92 million kilometers to reach Earth. Along the way, this hot gas “accumulates” the solar wind in front of it.

“This will affect its arrival time on Earth,” explained Raouafi. Knowledge of these space dynamics is critical: good space weather forecasting will allow power utilities to temporarily shut down power to avoid a power surge from a CME, and potentially throw off power to millions.

Infamously, in 1989, a powerful CME associated with solar flares knocked out power to millions in Quebec, Canada. The CME struck the Earth’s magnetic field on March 12 of that year, and then, wrote NASA astronomer Sten Odenwald, “Soon after 2:44 a.m. on March 13, the currents found a weakness in Quebec’s power grid. In less than two minutes, the entire Quebec power grid lost power. During the 12-hour blackout that followed, millions of people found themselves suddenly in dark and underground office buildings, pedestrian tunnels, and blocked elevators.” The same event solar fried a $10 million transformer at the Salem Nuclear Power Plant in New Jersey.

“Hopefully we’ll see something that surprises us a little bit.”

After this Christmas Eve trip through the corona, the probe has two more passes planned in March and June 2025 that will bring it a similar distance to the Sun. This is a real exploration in an uncharted territory, a place where scientists are looking for business.

“I hope we see something that surprises us a little bit,” Raouafi said.