NASA said Friday that its Parker solar probe was “safe” and operating normally after successfully completing the closest approach to the Sun of any man-made object.
The spacecraft passed within 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles) of the Sun's surface on December 24, flying into the Sun's outer atmosphere called the corona, on a mission to help scientists learn more about the closest star to Earth.
The agency said the operations team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland received the signal, a beacon tone, from the probe just before midnight Thursday.
The spacecraft is expected to send detailed telemetry data about its status on January 1, NASA added.
Moving at up to 430,000 mph (692,000 kph), the spacecraft endured temperatures of up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius), according to NASA's website.
“This close-up study of the Sun allows Parker Solar Probe to take measurements that help scientists better understand how material in this region is heated to millions of degrees and trace the origin of the solar wind (a continuous flow of material escaping of the Sun). , and discover how energetic particles accelerate to reach the speed close to that of light,” the agency added.
Get daily national news
Get the day's top news, political, economic and current affairs headlines delivered to your inbox once a day.
“We are rewriting the textbooks on how the Sun works with data from this probe,” Dr. Joseph Westlake, NASA's director of heliophysics, told Reuters.
“This mission was theorized in the 1950s,” he said, adding that it is an “amazing achievement to create technologies that allow us to deepen our understanding of how the sun works.”
The Parker Solar Probe launched in 2018 and has been circling gradually closer to the sun, using flybys of Venus to gravitationally pull it into a closer orbit with the sun.
Westlake said the team is preparing for even more flybys in the extended phase of the mission, hoping to capture unique events.
–Reporting by Bipasha Dey, Shubham Kalia and Surbhi Misra in Bengaluru; Editing by Kate Mayberry