Published 15:42 IST, March 18th 2023
NASA's Parker solar probe makes 15th closest approach to Sun after mysterious glitch
NASA's Parker solar probe was launched on August 12, 2018, from Florida and is designed to solve the mysteries of the Sun's corona and solar wind.
The Parker solar probe just made its 15th closest approach to the Sun, the first after it suffered a mysterious glitch in February. NASA's website of the Parker probe revealed that the spacecraft got closest to the Sun at 2 AM IST on March 18 and was about 8.5 million km from the solar surface.
Launched on August 12, 2018, aboard the Delta-IV Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the Parker probe is designed to solve the mysteries of the Sun's corona and solar wind. The corona, the outermost layer of the solar atmosphere, can heat up to a million degrees celsius which is surprisingly greater than even the Sun's surface. During its latest flyby, the spacecraft is estimated to have endured a temperature of 1,400°C. To protect it from the immense heat, engineers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory equipped it with a 4.5-inch-thick carbon-composite heat shield that keeps the instruments at room temperature.
Parker probe makes first flyby since glitch
Mission Update:
— NASA Sun & Space (@NASASun) February 17, 2023
On Feb. 12, one of the instruments on Parker Solar Probe was powered off but is expected to return to normal operations soon. The overall spacecraft remains healthy.
Learn more: https://t.co/UEEUQM1pRF pic.twitter.com/YroH86cclo
On February 17, NASA announced that one of the spacecraft's instruments shut down prematurely. "It happened during the application of an approved flight software patch to the Energetic Particle Instrument (EPI-Hi). An anomaly review board determined the instrument was power cycled prematurely before the new patch was completely loaded," an official statement by NASA read.
Back then, the agency said that the spacecraft's overall health remains stable and that the instrument will be off for a few weeks. Currently, the spacecraft is hurtling around the Sun at speeds of over 5.8 lakh kilometers per hour while collecting solar plasma to understand the reason for the corona's extreme temperatures. Its objective is also to explore what accelerates the solar wind. Parker is named after astrophysicist Eugene Parker who theorised the concepts about solar winds and the corona. According to NASA, the mission will end in June 2025 when the probe is at its 24th perihelion, the closest point to the Sun.
Updated 15:42 IST, March 18th 2023