NASA’s Parker Solar Probe becomes first spacecraft to ‘touch’ the sun

The Parker Solar Probe launched in 2018 and set out to circle closer and closer to the sun. Scientists, including the spacecraft’s namesake astrophysicist Eugene Parker, want to answer fundamental questions about the solar wind that streams out from the sun, flinging energetic particles across the solar system.

The sun’s corona is much hotter than the actual surface of the star, and the spacecraft could provide insight about why. The corona is one million degrees Kelvin (1,800,000 degrees Fahrenheit) at its hottest point, while the surface is around 6,000 Kelvin (10,340 degrees Fahrenheit).

Now, thanks to Parker’s latest close approach to the sun, the spacecraft helped scientists determine that these switchbacks originate from the solar surface.

Before Parker Solar Probe’s mission is done, it will have made 21 close approaches to the sun over the course of seven years. The probe will orbit within 3.9 million miles of the sun’s surface in 2024, closer to the star than Mercury — the closest planet to the sun.

Although that sounds far, researchers equate this to the probe sitting on the four-yard line of a football field and the sun being the end zone.

When closest to the sun, the 4½-inch-thick carbon-composite solar shields will have to withstand temperatures close to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. However, the inside of the spacecraft and its instruments will remain at a comfortable room temperature.

“Flying so close to the Sun, Parker Solar Probe now senses conditions in the magnetically dominated layer of the solar atmosphere — the corona — that we never could before,” said Nour Raouafi, Parker project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, in a statement.

“We see evidence of being in the corona in magnetic field data, solar wind data, and visually in images. We can actually see the spacecraft flying through coronal structures that can be observed during a total solar eclipse.”

Getting up close with a star

In April, the Parker team realized their spacecraft had crossed the boundary and entered the solar atmosphere for the first time.

It occurred when the spacecraft made its eighth flyby of the sun and registered magnetic and particle conditions specific to a boundary where the sun’s massive solar atmosphere ends and the solar wind begins — 8.1 million miles above the surface of the sun.

“We were fully expecting that, sooner or later, we would encounter the corona for at least a short duration of time,” said Justin Kasper, lead study author, University of Michigan professor and deputy chief technology…