NASA's daredevil solar spacecraft survives 2nd close flyby of our sun

NASA's Parker Solar Probe has successfully completed its second close flyby of the sun, the space agency announced earlier this week.

The car-sized spacecraft swooped within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun's surface at a whopping 430,000 miles per hour (692,000 kilometers per hour), matching the historic record it set during its encounter on Christmas Eve last year.

During this approach, which occurred on Saturday (March 22), the Parker Solar Probe once again operated autonomously, with its four science instruments programmed to collect science data about solar wind from inside the sun's corona — the outermost layer of its atmosphere. On Tuesday (March 25), the probe beamed home a beacon tone, signaling that it was in good health and that all systems were functioning normally, NASA said in a statement.

"The flyby, the second at this distance and speed, allows the spacecraft to conduct unrivaled scientific measurements of the solar wind and related activity," the statement reads.

Scientists hope the close-up data collected by the probe will help them better predict space weather as well as solve long-standing mysteries about our star, such as why its corona is hundreds of times hotter than its surface as it extends into space.

"This mission's trailblazing research is rewriting the textbooks on solar science by going to a place no human-made object has ever been," NASA acting Administrator Janet Petro said in another statement.

The spacecraft's record-setting achievements highlight the effectiveness of its custom heat shield, which safeguards the probe from the sun's intense heat, enabling its electronics and instruments to function at room temperature — even while it faces directly toward our star to collect solar material.

In recognition of the specially designed thermal protection system and other advancements in aeronautics that contributed to the spacecraft’s design, the Parker Solar Probe team — comprising engineers and scientists from NASA, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, and 40 other partner organizations nationwide — was recently honored with the 2024 Robert J. Collier Trophy annual award by the National Aeronautic Association.

"This amazing team brought to life an incredibly difficult space science mission that had been studied, and determined to be impossible, for more than 60 years," Ralph Semmel, who is the director of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, said in the statement

"They did so by solving numerous long-standing technology challenges and dramatically advancing our nation’s spaceflight capabilities."

The Parker Solar Probe, which launched in 2018, is scheduled for one more flyby this year at approximately the same speed and distance from the sun, on June 19.

Correction 3/28: The spacecraft swooped within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun's surface. This article has been updated to reflect that.