ASTRONOMY: NASA'S SOLAR PROBE ‘TOUCHES' THE SUN

The Parker Solar Probe is part of the way through its seven-year mission to investigate the inner workings of our nearest star

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has made history after becoming the first spacecraft to plunge into the Sun’s atmosphere. The milestone journey was made on 28 April 2021, nearly three years after the probe’s launch in August 2018. It happened during Parker’s eighth flyby of the star at the centre of our Solar System. The probe spent a total of five hours travelling amid the plasma and solar winds in the Sun’s upper atmosphere, or corona.

The landmark event was not announced until 14 December because the data recorded by the probe took several months to reach Earth, and then several more to be processed and analysed by scientists.

“We were fully expecting that, sooner or later, we would encounter the corona for at least a short duration of time,” commented Dr Justin Kasper, lead author of the paper that announced the historic flyby, published in Physical Review Letters. “But it is very exciting that we’ve already reached it,” said Kasper, who is associate professor of climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan.