It’s alive! The intrepid spacecraft that embraced the Sun survived the encounter, NASA announced

The Solar Parker Probe, a NASA probe that on Christmas Eve managed to make the closest ever approach of a human object to the Sun, “is safe”, the North American space agency announced this Friday.

“All clear“. Parker Solar Probe is doing well, and this Thursday he sent his regards to NASA, the space agency revealed today.

At 11:53 am on Christmas Eve, the intrepid spacecraft: was the closest an object built by Humanity has ever been to our star — just 6.1 million km away. At the closest point to our star, it supported temperatures of 982°C.

At this point, the intrepid spacecraft was within the upper atmosphere of the Sun, “literally touching the star,” NASA’s deputy director of heliophysics, Nicki Rayl.

This incredible feat of speed was achieved thanks to the help of seven gravitational “pulses” of passages around Venusthe last of which occurred in November 2024.

After the historic passage by the Sun, two days of suspense: during the flyby, NASA had to lose contact with the spacecraftand had to wait for two days for news from the probe.

This was the 22nd time that Parker has made a close pass to the sun, and is expected to do so at least two more passesbut this was the closest she has ever been and will be to the star.

The Solar Parker Probe is the fastest spacecraft built by manhaving reached a speed of 690,000 km/h at its closest approximation.

It is equipped with a heat shield which keeps its sensitive instruments just above room temperature, at around 30°C. This 4.5 centimeter thick protective layer was constructed after more than a decade of research.

The system of water cooling, with carbon foam layers insulation and a coating of glossy white ceramic paint to reflect the worst of the heat give the probe its invulnerability to the glare of the sun.

Launched in 2018 to explore the Sun, Parker has been flying ever since directly into your outer atmospheresimilar to a crown, while collecting data about our star.

Scientists hope this data can help solve a mystery long-standing influence on the Sun’s outer atmosphere, which has been troubling them for decades: the so-called “coronal heating problem“: despite being further away from the Sun’s main source of energy (its core), the solar corona is much hotter than the Sun’s surface, the photosphere.

Our standard model of stars suggests that the closer we get to the stellar core, where main sequence stars like the Sun carry out nuclear fusion to transform hydrogen into helium and release energy, the hotter it gets.

All layers of the Sun appear to strictly obey this rule — with the exception of the corona, which can reach temperatures exceeding 1.1 million degrees Celsius; about 1,600 km closer to the Sun’s heat source, the photosphere reaches a relatively pleasant 4,100°C.

Parker will continue its mission, making flybys of the Sun on March 22, 2025. Then, its last flyby will take place on June 19, 2025.