On the first day of the New Year, the Parker Solar Probe added to the joy of space enthusiasts by sending back more positive news about its record-breaking flyby of the Sun. On Christmas night, this spacecraft made the closest encounter with the sun in history with an astonishing speed of 690 thousand kilometers per hour.
On Wednesday, January 1, Mission Control at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland began receiving the first telemetry data from the Parker Solar Probe. NASA said in a statement Thursday that the data confirm that Parker’s science systems and instruments are intact and functioning normally after the probe’s historic encounter with the Sun.
“Everything looks good with the spacecraft’s systems and the way the instruments are working,” Michael Buckley, a spokesman for the Applied Physics Laboratory, which oversees the Parker Solar Probe mission, told Space.com. Parker is truly an amazing spaceship!”
The latest telemetry data also confirms that the Parker Solar Probe successfully executed the commands programmed into its flight computers and that its science instruments were working during the flyby. In other words, the spacecraft has collected the expected valuable data about our star while passing approximately 6.1 million kilometers from the Sun’s surface.
“While coming closer to the Sun than any man-made object in history, Parker performed exactly as planned and made observations that no one else has been able to make before,” Helen Winters, the Parker Probe mission manager at NASA’s Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a statement. “
read more
Transmission of telemetry data that Mission Control receives through NASA’s Remote Space Network continued through Thursday, Buckley said. However, Parker will provide us with the collected scientific data in late January; When the spacecraft’s most powerful antenna is better aligned with the ground to transmit data at a higher speed.
Scientists did not communicate with the probe during Parker’s close encounter with the sun on Christmas Eve. Then last Friday, with the first signal from the spacecraft, it was confirmed that Parker had survived the close encounter and was functioning normally. According to NASA, thanks to its custom-made heat shield, approximately 11.5 cm thick, Parker was able to withstand extreme temperatures of 982 degrees Celsius as it flew through the Sun’s atmosphere.
Scientists hope Parker’s data will help them decipher long-standing mysteries about the Sun; Including why the outer atmosphere of the sun gets hundreds of times hotter as it gets further away from its surface. Parker will make two more flybys of the Sun on March 22 and June 19, 2025, at roughly the same speed and distance.
