December 24, 2024Reuters
(Reuters) – NASA's Parker Solar Probe is set to make history on Tuesday by flying past the solar corona, the outer part of the Sun's atmosphere, a mission that should allow scientists to learn more about the star .
“No man-made object has ever come this close to a star. So Parker will truly be sending us data from an unexplored region,” said Nick Pinkine, mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
The probe was to fly 6.1 million kilometers from the surface of the Sun at 11:53 GMT, it will then be out of range and mission managers will only be able to determine the state in which it is after this flight. Friday.
Parker, which travels at 692,0000 km/h, will have to withstand temperatures of 982 degrees Celsius, NASA said on its website.
When the probe flew through the Sun's atmosphere for the first time, in 2021, it notably collected new data relating to the limits of the star's atmosphere.
The craft was launched in 2018 and gradually moved closer to the Sun.
(Joe Brock; version française Camille Raynaud)
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