History-making NASA probe flies closer to the sun than ever before and breaks speed record
A NASA probe ventured closer to the sun than any spacecraft in history on Christmas Eve — and it whirled by at astounding speeds that also made it the fastest thing ever made by humans.Just before 7 a.m.on Dec.
24, the Parker Solar Probe passed within just 3.8 million miles of the sun’s surface — seven times closer to the burning ball of gas than any other mission has gotten, according to the New York Times.As it skirted the corona — or the sun’s outer atmosphere — it careened through space at a record-breaking 430,000 miles per hour, the outlet said.This broke the probe’s own speed record, making it the quickest thing assembled by human hands.The close encounter is the culmination of a six-year mission that has sent the Parker probe zipping ever closer to the sun during nearly two dozen earlier flybys that have revealed new information about the celestial body.
It has also spotted comets, taken pictures and added to our knowledge of nearby Venus.“It’s a voyage of discovery,” Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, told the Times.“We really are going into the unknown.Nothing has flown through the atmosphere of a star, and no other mission will for a long time.”The probe’s heat shield — which protects the machinery from temperatures of about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit — has also held up better than scientists expected as it nears the previously unexplored stellar region, the outlet said.“We feel comfortable that the mission is doing really well, even way better than we designed it,” Nour Rawafi, project scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory, told The Times.“But it still remains a very high-risk mission.
Anything can happen at any time.”The probe is searching for information about solar winds that emanates from the sun, which is right now in its solar maximum, or most active state.The mission has already discovered fascinating new secrets about the life-giving star, a 4.5 billion-year-old...