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The Parker Solar Probe is just 15 million miles from our star's surface earlier this week.
Mission controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab received a status beacon signal from the spacecraft at 4:46 pm EST on Wednesday. The beacon indicated status "A" -the best of all four possible status signals, meaning that the Parker Solar Probe is operating well with all instruments running and collecting science data. The signal also suggests that they are any minor issues, they are resolved autonomously by the spacecraft.
Caption image: Members of the Parker Solar Probe mission team at the Applied Physics Lab Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.
Credit:
Picture credit: Ed Whitman / NASA / APL Johns Hopkins
"Parker Solar Probe is designed to take care of itself and its precious payload during this approach," said Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency headquarters in Washington. "Parker is the culmination of six decades of scientific progress." Now we have made humanity our first, but it's not just here.
On Monday at 10:28 p.m., the spacecraft achieved its first perihelion, the point on its orbit when it is closest to the sun. During the past few days, the Parker Solar Probe was completely out of contact with the mission operations team at APL because of interference from the overwhelming radio emissions.
Fifteen million miles has been broken down by Helios B in 1976 and broken down by Parker on Oct. 29. The maneuver exposed the spacecraft to intense heat and solar radiation in a complex solar wind environment.
At this distance, the intense sunlight heated the sun-facing side of the Parker Solar Probe's heat shield, called the Thermal Protection System, to about 820 degrees Fahrenheit. This temperature will climb up to 2,500 F as the spacecraft makes closer approaches to the sun in the future-but all the while, the spacecraft instruments and systems that are protected by the heat shield in the mid 80s F.
How did the Solar Probe Parker journey of 90 million miles begin?
At its closest approach, the Parker Solar Probe reached a top speed of 213,200 miles per hour, setting a new record for spacecraft speed.
Parker Solar Probe's first solar phase phase experiment on Oct. 31, and the spacecraft will continue collecting science data through the end of the solar phase phase on Nov. 11. It will be several weeks after the end of the solar phase data begins downlinking to Earth.
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