After spending 990 days speeding through the solar system and zipping around Venus and our home star, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has achieved the …
After spending 990 days speeding through the solar system and zipping around Venus and our home star, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has achieved the headline goal of its mission: It « touched the sun. » More specifically, an instrument aboard the probe, which was launched on Aug.12,2018, notified scientists back on Earth that the spacecraft had crossed a critical threshold and was within the sun’s corona — a furnace of unfathomable proportions, where temperatures can reach up to 3 million degrees Fahrenheit. The announcement was made at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans on Tuesday. Michael Stevens, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics (CfA), Harvard and the Smithsonian, explained that the probe had to cross the Alfvén point, a fuzzy layer where the sun’s magnetic field holds the star’s plasma and wind tightly.
