Parker Solar Probe nears sun's corona

NASA's Parker Solar Probe was 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.

Parker was on course to fly 6.1 million km from the sun's surface. With the spacecraft out of contact, it will be before mission operators confirm its health following the close flyby.

Moving at up to 692,000 kph, the spacecraft will endure temperatures of up to 982 degrees Celsius, NASA said on its website.

When the probe first passed into the solar atmosphere in 2021, it found new details about the boundaries of the sun's atmosphere and collected close-up images of coronal streamers, cusp-like structures seen during solar eclipses.

Since the spacecraft launched in 2018, the probe has been gradually circling closer towards the sun, using flybys of Venus to gravitationally pull it into a tighter orbit with the sun.

One instrument aboard the spacecraft captured visible light from Venus, giving scientists a new way to see through the planet's thick clouds to the surface below, NASA said.

The Parker Solar Probe was set to zoom by the sun during a record-breaking flyby, coming within 6.1 million kilometers of the solar surface during humanity’s closest approach to a star.

The uncrewed spacecraft was expected to fly at 692,000 kilometers per hour, which is fast enough to reach Tokyo from Washington, DC, in under a minute, according to NASA. 

The mission has been building up to this historic milestone since it launched on August 12, 2018 — an event attended by the probe’s namesake, Dr. Eugene Parker, an astrophysicist who pioneered the solar research field of heliophysics.

Parker was the first living person to have a spacecraft named after him. The astrophysicist, whose research revolutionized humanity’s understanding of the sun and interplanetary space, died at age 94 in March 2022.