A NASA spacecraft made history on Christmas Eve (December 24) by approaching the sun closer than any other spacecraft has ever done.
The Parker
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe accomplished this historic achievement by navigating the scorching heat of the corona, our star’s outer atmosphere, to fly within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) of the sun.
The flyby was Parker’s 22nd near approach to the sun, and it should have happened around 6:53 a.m. EST (1153 GMT). This is the closest the NASA craft has ever been and will ever be to the sun, though it is anticipated to make at least two more flybys. To be clear, we say “should have” because NASA had to break off contact with the spacecraft during this flyby; the agency says the first evidence that Parker survived will be delivered on December 27.
Breaking records is nothing new to Parker. Parker established its record as the fastest item ever constructed by humans on September 21, 2023, when it reached a speed of 394,736 miles per hour (635,266 km per hour). According to scientists, the sun-touching spaceship would have been travelling at 430,000 mph (692,000 kph) during its passage on Christmas Eve, smashing its own speed record. In contrast, the greatest speed of a Lockheed Martin jet fighter on Earth is about 300 times slower. Seven “boosts” of gravity from Venus flybys, the last of which took place in November 2024, helped achieve this amazing speed.
Mission of the Parker
However, breaking records is only a side effect of Parker’s primary goal, which is to get more knowledge about the sun. Specifically, in order to gather information about the solar corona, the spacecraft had to brave temperatures of 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius).
With this data, NASA’s scientists hope to shed light on a long-standing riddle that has plagued them for decades: the sun’s outer atmosphere. The so-called “coronal heating problem” is the result of the corona being significantly hotter than the photosphere, the sun’s surface, even though it is farther from the core, the sun’s main energy source. According to our standard model of stars, a star’s temperature increases with proximity to its stellar core, where main sequence stars like the sun use nuclear fusion to convert hydrogen into helium and release energy.
With the exception of the corona, which may reach temperatures of over 2 million degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 million degrees Celsius), all of the sun’s layers appear to strictly adhere to this law. The photosphere cools to a comparatively comfortable 7,400 degrees Fahrenheit (4,100 degrees Celsius) about 1,000 miles from the sun’s heat source.
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This Christmas, it would be like discovering that your chestnuts only roast when you put them a mile away from a fire! The solar corona must thus be heated by an additional mechanism, and scientists are naturally curious to find out what it is.
NASA’s Parker mission will continue, with flybys of the sun scheduled for March 22, 2025, and June 19, 2025, as the last scheduled flyby. The spaceship will travel at a comparable speed and approach the sun nearly as closely as it did on Christmas Eve on both of these approaches.
