The Parker spacecraft has survived its flight past the sun. After the next time a man-made object flew past the sun on Christmas, the probe sent a signal to Earth for the first time on Friday.
“Parker sent a signal back to Earth indicating it is in good condition and functioning normally,” the US space agency NASA wrote on the mission’s blog.
Closer to the sun than any probe has ever been
The signal was received by mission coordinators at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland on the night of December 26-27, after a 48-hour wait. The probe reached its closest point to the sun on December 24 at 12:53 pm (CET). At a distance of 6.1 million kilometers, it came closer to the Sun’s surface than any probe before.
Data is still pending
Data won’t be available until late January, when the probe’s main antenna points toward Earth, astrophysicist Volker Bothmer of the University of Göttingen said a few days before the flight. “But it will take a few years to evaluate and understand all the data.” According to NASA calculations, the probe, which was the size of a small car, was traveling at about 430,000 miles per hour at its closest point. the sun and maintained temperatures of around 1000 degrees Celsius.
It flew faster than any other object built by humans to date. To protect the instruments, it has an 11.4 centimeter thick heat shield, made mainly of carbon. According to NASA, it is even designed for a temperature of around 1,400 degrees.
Source: Krone
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