Historic moment: NASA spacecraft safe after closest approach to the Sun

On December 24, the spacecraft passed only 6.1 million km from the Sun’s surface, flying through the Sun’s outer atmosphere called the corona, in a mission that should help scientists learn more about the star closest to Earth. NASA announced that the operations team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland received a signal from the probe shortly before midnight on Thursday.

The spacecraft is expected to send detailed telemetry data about its status on January 1, NASA added.

Traveling at speeds of up to 692,000 km/h, the spacecraft has withstood temperatures of up to 982 degrees Celsius, according to NASA’s website.

“This close-up study of the Sun enables the Parker Solar Probe to make measurements that help scientists better understand how the material in this region is heated to millions of degrees, what is the origin of the solar wind, and how energy particles accelerate to a speed close to the speed of light,” the agency added.

The Parker solar probe was launched in 2018 and is gradually entering increasingly narrow orbits around the Sun, using the gravity of Venus during flybys of that planet.