Launched in August 2018, the spaceship is on a seven-year mission to deepen scientific understanding of our star and help forecast space-weather events that can affect life on Earth.
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Representative Image- AFP
NASA’s pioneering Parker Solar Probe made history Tuesday, flying closer to the Sun than any other spacecraft, with its heat shield exposed to scorching temperatures topping 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit (930 degrees Celsius).
The spaceship launched in August 2018, is on a seven-year mission to deepen scientific understanding of our star and help forecast space-weather events that can affect life on Earth.
Tuesday’s historic flyby should have occurred at precisely 6:53am (1153 GMT), although mission scientists will have to wait until Friday for confirmation as they lose contact with the craft for several days due to its proximity to the Sun.
“Right now, Parker Solar Probe is flying closer to a star than anything has ever been before,” at 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) away, NASA official Nicky Fox said in a video on social media Tuesday morning.
“It is just a total ‘yay, we did it,’ moment.”
If the distance between Earth and the Sun is the equivalent to the length of an American football field, the spacecraft should have been about four yards (meters) from the end zone at the moment of closest approach – known as perihelion.
“This is one example of NASA’s bold missions, doing something that no one else has ever done before to answer long-standing questions about our universe,” Parker Solar Probe program scientist Arik Posner said in a statement on Monday.
“We can’t wait to receive that first status update from the spacecraft and start receiving the science data in the coming weeks.”
So effective is the heat shield that the probe’s internal instr