The Parker Solar Probe is set to make the closest-ever flight to the Sun on Christmas Eve, reaching a distance of 3.8 million miles from the Sun's surface. The probe will provide scientists with valuable data about the Sun's corona, a mystery that has puzzled astronomers for years.
A NASA spacecraft is getting ready for a record-setting 'closest-ever flight' to the Sun on Christmas Eve. The Parker Solar Probe launched back in 2018 to examine our local star – and will give scientists a very special. The probe will reach as close as 3.8 million miles from the Sun 's surface – protected by a 160lb heat shield. That might sound like a lot, but it's a stone's throw given that the Sun is 91.4 million miles from Earth.
But we should hear a 'beacon tone' on Friday, December 27 that confirms whether the probe survived its trip. 'This is one example of NASA’s bold missions, doing something that no one else has ever done before to answer longstanding questions about our universe,' said Arik Posner, a scientist on the Parker Solar Probe program at Nasa. We’re excited to hear back from the spacecraft when it swings back around the Sun. It should return highly valuable scientific data that may help astronomers to solve some of our star's most puzzling mysteries. For instance, scientists still don't exactly know why the corona – the outermost part of the Sun's atmosphere – is so much hotter than its surface.The Parker Solar Probe has entered the 'corona' of the Sun. It's the closest a man-made object has ever gotten to our star. This pic of a phenomenon known as a 'coronal streamer' was snapped by the probe in November 2018. What is it, why does it exist, and why is it so ruddy hot all the time? It’s a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, and provides most of the energy for life on Earth. But its weight is 330,000 times that of Earth, and accounts for almost all of the mass in the Solar System. The Sun is mostly made up of hydrogen (73%), helium (25%) and then a number of other elements like oxygen, carbon and iron. The Sun formed 4 billion years ago
NASA Parker Solar Probe Sun SPACE EXPLORATION SCIENCE
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