The Parker Solar Probe interplanetary station, which approached a record distance from the Sun on December 24, made contact with Earth. This was announced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) of the United States.
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| NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will approach 6.1 million kilometers from the sun, closer than any other spacecraft. |
| Photo : NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben |
The agency’s website specifies that all the probe’s systems are functioning normally. The station’s operators, based at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, received its signal shortly before midnight on December 27, local time. The probe should transmit detailed telemetry data to Earth on its status on 1is January and, at the end of the month, it will begin sending scientific data collected during its flyby of the Sun.
Scientists hope that the data collected will allow them to better understand the processes of heating of matter in the solar corona, the formation of solar winds and to learn how high-energy solar particles reach speeds close to that of light.
The Parker Solar Probe (PSP) mission was launched into space in August 2018. The probe performed its previous gravitational maneuver around the Sun in 2021.
TASS/VNA/CVN
