The Parker Solar Probe is expected to skim the Sun’s outer atmosphere on Tuesday. NASA’s probe will come within 3.86 million miles of the solar surface, closer than any human-built object ever. It might seem distant, but Mercury is 39.4 million away from the system’s namesake star. The probe will be coming in hot in more ways than one, hitting 1,800 degrees while hurtling through space at an awe-inspiring 430,000 miles per hour.
The Parker Solar Probe, the fastest object ever built on Earth, was launched in 2018. The probe has already orbited over 20 times, but the Christmas Eve flyby will be the closest one yet, after slingshotting around Venus to set its trajectory. Scientists expect the probe to fly through plumes of solar plasma during the record-setting excursion. The probe is protected from the intense heat by a 4.5-inch-thick hexagonal carbon-fiber solar shield. While the flight itself sounds cool as hell, NASA’s mission is to conduct heliophysics research. Dr. Kelly Korreck, a NASA program astrophysicist, told NBC News:
“This is the birthplace of space weather. We’ve observed space weather from afar, but now Parker is living through it. Now we’ll be able to understand better how space weather forms, and when we see storms on the sun in our telescopes, we’ll be able to say what that means for us here on Earth.”
Suitably, the Parker Space Probe is named after Eugene Parker, the University of Chicago solar physicist who first theorized the existence of the solar wind during the 1950s. The probe has two more close flybys planned to further explore the Sun’s corona before the end of its mission. A few discoveries have already been made by the Parker probe. It discovered evidence of a zone free of cosmic dust out to 3.5 million miles from the Sun. The dust is simply vaporized by the Sun’s radiation.
