



NASA’s Parker Solar Probe just completed its first orbit of the Sun, reaching the aphelion, the farthest point in orbit from the star. The probe has begun its second orbit, of the 24 planned ones. Launched on 12 August 2018 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, it completed an unprecedented close flyby of the Sun last November.





Parker has already delivered more than 17 gigabits of data via the Deep Space Network and will transmit the full dataset from the first orbit by April.





“It’s been an illuminating and fascinating first orbit,” said Parker Solar Probe project manager Andy Driesman, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which is responsible for the design, construction and mission control of the project. “We’ve learned a lot about how the spacecraft operates and reacts to the solar environment, and I’m proud to say the team’s projections have been very accurate.”





“We’ve always said that we don’t know what to expect until we look at the data,” said project scientist Nour Raouafi, also of John Hopkins. “The data we have received hints at many new things that we’ve not seen before and at potential new discoveries. Parker Solar Probe is delivering on the mission’s promise of revealing the mysteries of our Sun.”





For now, the team is preparing for the second solar encounter, to take place in early April. The spacecraft’s second perihelion mission, just as the first, will bring it to a distance of about 24 million kilometres from the Sun. This is half the distance of the previous record – 43.5 million kilometres – set by Helios 2 in 1976. Traveling at 343,112 km/h, Parker also broke previous speed records. Prior to the approach, data will be downloaded, and the spacecraft will receive a month’s worth of automated command sequences.





The solar probe plans to break its own records as well – for its final flyby in 2025, it will approach the sun within 6.16 million kilometres.





Parker Solar Probe’s mission is to understand the fundamental physics of the Sun – such as how solar materials are accelerated at such high speeds, and why the Sun’s corona, its atmosphere, reaches temperatures that are so much hotter than the surface below. The historic mission will “revolutionize our understanding of the Sun, where changing conditions can propagate out into the solar system, affecting Earth and other worlds. Parker Solar Probe will travel through the Sun’s atmosphere, closer to the surface than any spacecraft before it, facing brutal heat and radiation conditions — and ultimately providing humanity with the closest-ever observations of a star,” according to NASA’s website.





Where is Parker Solar Probe right now?





Picture credit: NASA