NASA probe attempts closest ever approach to the sun
Al Jazeera
With the spacecraft out of contact, it will be Friday before mission operators confirm its historic flyby.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is expected to make history by flying into the sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona, on a mission to help scientists learn more about Earth’s closest star.
“No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory,” Nick Pinkine, mission operations manager at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a United States space agency blog on Tuesday.
Parker was on course to fly 6.1 million kilometres (3.8 million miles) from the sun’s surface at 11:53 GMT on Tuesday. With the spacecraft out of contact, it will be Friday before mission operators confirm its health after the close flyby.
Moving at up to 692,000km/h (430,000mph), fast enough to fly from Washington, DC, to Tokyo in under a minute, the spacecraft will endure temperatures of up to 982 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees Fahrenheit), NASA said on its website.
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