Parker Solar Probe has also made discoveries across the inner solar system. Observations showed how giant solar explosions called coronal mass ejections vacuum up dust as they sweep across the solar system, and other observations revealed unexpected findings about solar energetic particles. Flybys of Venus have documented the planet’s natural radio emissions from its atmosphere, as well as the first complete image of its orbital dust ring.
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“The data is so important for the science community because it gives us another vantage point,” said Kelly Korreck, a program scientist at NASA Headquarters and heliophysicist who worked on one of the mission’s instruments. “By getting firsthand accounts of what’s happening in the solar atmosphere, Parker Solar Probe has revolutionized our understanding of the sun.”
“We now understand the solar wind and its acceleration away from the sun,” said Adam Szabo, the Parker Solar Probe mission scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This close approach will give us more data to understand how it’s accelerated closer in.”
“The data that will come down from the spacecraft will be fresh information about a place that we, as humanity, have never been,” said Joe Westlake, the director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters. “It’s an amazing accomplishment.”
The spacecraft’s next planned close solar passes come on March 22, 2025, and June 19, 2025.
Operations teams have confirmed NASA’s mission to “touch” the sun survived its record-breaking closest approach to the solar surface on Dec. 24, 2024.
Close to the sun, the spacecraft relies on a carbon foam shield to protect it from the extreme heat in the upper solar atmosphere called the corona, which can exceed 1 million degrees Fahrenheit. The shield was designed to reach temperatures of 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit—hot enough to melt steel—while keeping the instruments behind it shaded at a comfortable room temperature. In the hot but low-density corona, the spacecraft’s shield is expected to warm to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
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NASA’s Parker Solar Probe sets new record for sun proximity (2024, December 28)
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By flying through the solar corona, Parker Solar Probe can take measurements that help scientists better understand how the region gets so hot, trace the origin of the solar wind (a constant flow of material escaping the sun), and discover how energetic particles are accelerated to half the speed of light.