Early on Christmas Eve in 2024, a NASA craft swooped at blazing speed through the sun’s atmosphere.
The Parker Solar Probe, equipped with a robust heat shield, made the closest-ever approach to our dynamic star, coming some 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from the stellar surface. That’s seven times closer than any other probe. The mission is designed to fly into the sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, which spawns many of the powerful solar storms and weather that impact Earth.
To understand our star’s behavior, a craft had to go where no craft had gone before.
“It’s really exciting,” Nour Raouafi, an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and project scientist for the mission, told Mashable. “The sun is like a laboratory to us.”
Though NASA announced the craft made the historic flyby on Christmas Eve, the probe will be in position to send a beacon tone to Earth on Dec. 27, which will confirm its safety.