The mystery of how the sun's corona, which is its outer atmosphere, reaches millions of degrees could have a surprising explanation: cosmic dust riding the magnetic waves carrying plasma on the solar wind.

"For decades, researchers have focused mainly on how electrons, ions, magnetic fields and plasma waves transport and dissipate energy in the solar atmosphere," said lead researcher Syed Ayaz of the University of Alabama in Huntsville in a statement. "Our work adds a new ingredient to this picture: dust grains."

The finding came courtesy of NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which has flown closer to the sun than any other spacecraft, skirting the corona at a distance of 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles). If you've ever witnessed a total solar eclipse, or even seen a photograph of one, then you will be familiar with the corona — the ghostly tendrils of light that surround the eclipsed sun. Those tendrils are formed from plasma, or ionized gas, at temperatures in excess of a million degrees Fahrenheit, compared to the sun's visible surface, the photosphere, which radiates at about 9,932 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius). At those temperatures, the photosphere outshines the corona only because the plasma in the corona is so sparsely distributed. This is why the only time we can see the corona is during a total solar eclipse, when the photospheric glare is blocked.

Parker does not carry a cosmic dust detector, and that's because until now dust has not been considered a serious component of the solar atmosphere. Indeed, in the high temperatures of the solar corona it had been thought that dust could not survive for very long and would therefore have no impact.

However, Parker does host a bunch of antennas and magnetometers collectively referred to as the FIELDS experiment, designed to measure the electromagnetic field and radio emissions in the solar corona. The antennas kept picking up unexpected spikes in voltage, which according to Ayaz and his team are produced by clouds of charged particles created when tiny dust grains slam into Parker at high velocity.

These dust grains have accrued an electrostatic charge, which can interact with the electromagnetic field carried by the solar wind as it leaves the sun, which in turn can influence waves of plasma reverberating through that electromagnetic field called Alfvén waves.

There are two possible, competing ways in which dust can affect the Alfvén waves, which in turn could determine how energy is dumped into the corona, heating it. On one hand, the mass of the dust can act to provide extra inertia to the plasma as it rides the solar wind, allowing the plasma energy to be transported across wider distances. On the other hand, the electric charge on the dust grains can bolster the interactions between charged particles in the plasma, the Alfvén waves and the solar electromagnetic field.

"If dust mass dominates, [Alfvén] wave energy may travel farther into the corona," said Ayaz. "If dust-charge effects dominate, the energy may be released more locally as particle heating."

The balance between these two effects can therefore control where and when energy is deposited into the corona, focusing it in areas and causing temperatures there to rise dramatically.

Future solar missions are now going to have to start taking dust into account, said Ayaz, with dedicated detectors designed to measure dust's properties close to the Sun.

"The bigger question is fascinating," said Ayaz. "Is dust simply passing through the near-Sun environment, or is it helping shape how electromagnetic energy becomes heat and solar-wind motion?"

The new discovery was reported on July 1 in The Astrophysical Journal.

The sun may not be green, but it turns out to be adept at recycling.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe has captured the clearest view yet of solar material billowing away from the sun before some of it makes a "U-turn," falling back toward the star after an eruption.

The snapshots reveal how the sun recycles its magnetic energy — a process that helps shape the next solar storm and could allow scientists to forecast space weather farther in advance.

The video below stitches together images taken during Parker's record-setting close approach to the sun on Christmas Eve 2024, when the spacecraft swooped within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) above the solar surface. During that flyby, Parker observed a solar flare erupting from the sun, just as scientists had hoped, capturing a bright blob of superheated material bursting into space.

Like a puff of breath on a cold winter day, the cloud of solar material can be seen coasting outward from the sun before thinning, with some of it curling back inward. That returning material was pulled back by powerful magnetic field lines that snap and rapidly realign into looping structures, some of which continue outward into space, while others stitch back to the sun, according to a NASA statement.

"We've previously seen hints that material can fall back into the sun this way, but to see it with this clarity is amazing," Nour Rawafi, the project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, said in the statement.

"This is a really fascinating, eye-opening glimpse into how the sun continuously recycles its coronal magnetic fields and material."

What Parker observed was a coronal mass ejection, or CME, which is an eruption of superheated plasma from the sun that, if directed toward Earth, can trigger powerful geomagnetic storms capable of disrupting power grids, radio communications and satellite navigation systems, while also igniting breathtaking auroras.

In the video above, as the CME expanded outward from the sun, nearby magnetic field lines stretched until they snapped apart "like the threads of an old piece of cloth pulled too tight," the NASA statement read. The torn magnetic fields quickly reconnected, forming giant loops, some of which continued traveling outward while others retracted back toward the sun, dragging blobs of solar material along in a process known as inflows.

As that material falls back, it interacts with and reshapes the magnetic fields closer to the sun's surface — changes that potentially alter the paths of future CMEs emerging from that region.

"That's enough to be the difference between a CME crashing into Mars versus sweeping by the planet with no or little effects," Angelos Vourlidas, who is the project scientist for WISPR, the instrument onboard Parker that captured the snapshots, and a researcher at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said in the same statement.

Such inflows have previously been observed before from a distance by missions, including the sun-watching SOHO observatory. But Parker's close-up close-up images revealed the returning material on scales never seen before, scientists say.

For the first time, scientists were able to directly measure the speed and size of the blobs falling back toward the sun, findings that they are currently using to refine models of space weather and the sun's complex magnetic environment, the statement read.

"Ultimately, this work may help scientists better predict the impact of space weather across the solar system on longer timescales than currently possible."

Scientists have created the first detailed maps of the outer edge of the sun's atmosphere, a shifting boundary where solar material breaks free of the sun's magnetic grip and streams out into space.

The new maps, built using close-up measurements from NASA's Parker Solar Probe along with data from more distant spacecraft, show that this boundary grows larger, rougher and more jagged as the sun becomes more active, periods in its cycle that are marked by increased sunspots and solar flares.

The new findings, published Dec. 11 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, could help improve space weather models of how solar activity affects Earth and sharpen predictions of atmospheric behavior around other stars, scientists say.

"Before, we could only estimate the sun's boundary from far away without a way to test if we got the right answer," study lead author Sam Badman, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics ∣ Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) in Massachusetts, said in a statement. "But now we have an accurate map that we can use to navigate it as we study it."

"And, importantly, we also are able to watch it as it changes and match those changes with close-up data," he added. "That gives us a much clearer idea of what's really happening around the sun."

The boundary, known as the Alfvén surface, marks the point where the outward flow of the solar wind becomes faster than magnetic waves that would otherwise carry material back toward the sun. Beyond this "point of no return," solar particles can no longer fall back and instead stream permanently into interplanetary space.

Scientists knew that this boundary shifts with the sun's roughly 11-year activity cycle — expanding and becoming more complex during solar maximum, and shrinking during quieter solar minimum periods. Until now, however, they lacked direct confirmation of what those changes actually looked like.

"That's actually what we predicted in the past, but now we can confirm it directly," Badman said in the statement.

To build the new maps, the researchers combined close-up measurements from the Parker Solar Probe, which repeatedly plunged through the sun's outer atmosphere during record-breaking close passes as the solar cycle ramped up toward its peak, with data from the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter and NASA's Wind mission, both of which reside about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth.

Using an instrument onboard Parker called the Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons (SWEAP), the team directly sampled the region beneath the Alfvén surface, confirming that the maps correctly show where the sun's magnetic influence fades and the solar wind escapes, according to the statement.

"This work shows without a doubt that Parker Solar Probe is diving deep with every orbit into the region where the solar wind is born," study co-author Michael Stevens, an astronomer at the CfA and the principal investigator of the SWEAP instrument, said in the statement.

Pinpointing where and how the solar wind escapes the sun is essential to answering some of the biggest open questions in solar physics, including why the sun's corona gets hotter the farther it extends away from the solar surface.

Understanding exactly where this boundary lies is also critical for improving space weather forecasts, which help protect astronauts in space, and satellites and power grids on Earth from disruptive solar storms, scientists say.

During the next solar minimum, the Parker Solar Probe will again plunge deep into the sun's atmosphere, allowing scientists to watch how this boundary evolves over a complete solar cycle, according to the statement.

"There are still a number of fascinating physics questions about the sun's corona that we don't fully understand," said Stevens.

Humanity's understanding of the solar system has evolved dramatically following the advent of spaceflight. Over the past seven decades, thousands of sophisticated spacecraft have been launched on ambitious missions to look down on our planet, explore the wonders of our star's domain, or venture into the interstellar realm beyond it.

The imagery and scientific data collection by these robotic explorers has inspired generations and forever altered how we view our planet and the universe around us. As a result, spacecraft such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the venerable Voyager 1 probe are now household names, but how many of us actually know where they are as they beam back their precious data? How many of us have peered into the areas of space where they orbit or sail through the cosmos?

Read on to discover the approximate locations of five far-flung spacecraft in the October night sky. If you're new to exploring the stars, be sure to check out our roundup of the best smartphone astronomy apps, which use augmented reality tech to help guide you to the locations of everything from stars and nebulas to galaxies, wandering comets and spacecraft.

Find the locations of famous spacecraft in the October night sky

James Webb Space Telescope — 907,000 miles (1.46 million km) from Earth

The James Webb Space Telescope launched on Christmas Day in 2021 on a mission to unravel the mysteries surrounding the creation and evolution of the cosmos. From its gravitationally stable vantage point at Lagrange Point 2, the JWST is tasked with peering into deep space to capture ancient light from the early universe and observe the formation of stars, protoplanetary systems and so much more. Check out our article detailing 12 amazing JWST discoveries to find out how the most powerful telescope ever launched is pushing the boundaries of astronomy.

To find the JWST's position in the night sky, you'll first need to locate the red star Aldebaran, which can be found half way up the eastern sky above the familiar stars of the constellation Orion around midnight in October. Next, scan the region above until you find the diffuse, hazy light of the Pleiades star cluster. Webb will be located approximately 5 degrees — roughly the width of your three middle fingers held at arm's length against the night sky — below the Pleiades and will travel closer to Aldebaran and the other stars of the constellation Taurus as the month wears on.

Remember: this guide can show you the approximate location of the spacecraft, but it is impossible to actually spot them, as they are far too small and distant for even the most powerful of telescopes to resolve.

Parker Solar Probe — 91 million miles (147.6 million km) from Earth

NASA's Parker Solar Probe became the first spacecraft to "touch" the sun on April 28, 2021, when it careened through the sun's outer atmosphere — also known as the corona — during the eighth of 24 planned close passes of our parent star. The probe has flown seven times closer to the sun than any spacecraft before while braving temperatures approaching 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit (1,300 degrees Celsius) to shed light on the plasma and magnetic field dynamics that drive the solar wind.

The patch of sky containing the Parker Solar Probe can be found low in the southwestern sky at sunset in October, though you'll need a clear view of the horizon to spot it before it sets out of view! First, find the bright star Antares in the constellation Scorpius. The Parker Solar Probe's location is roughly 5 degrees to the upper left of the red supergiant star, with the constellation Ophiuchus shining above and the distinctive "teapot" asterism of the constellation Sagittarius to its left.

NASA's Juno spacecraft — 464.8 million miles (748 million km) from Earth

The Juno spacecraft reached orbit around Jupiter in 2016 and has spent close to a decade — and several mission extensions — collecting data on both the gas giant and its many diverse moons. Its most recent mission extension expired on the same day that the current government shutdown came into effect. As a result, an ominous question mark hangs over the fate of the veteran spacecraft.

To find Juno's location, you'll first need to locate the bright stars Castor and Pollux in the constellation Gemini, which twinkles high overhead in the eastern sky during the predawn hours in October. Jupiter will be easy to find as a bright "morning star" shining steadily to the lower right of Castor and Pollux. Juno is somewhere in orbit around the planet, far too small to be seen.

New Horizons — 5.88 billion miles (9.46 billion km) from Earth

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft launched in January 2006 and after nine years travelling in space became the first human-made object to visit the dwarf planet Pluto in July 2015. The short-lived flyby transformed our understanding of the far-flung world, revealing surprising aspects of its composition, tenuous atmosphere and the nature of its largest moon, Charon. New Horizons later went on to study the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth in 2019 and is now working to gather heliophysics data while enroute to interstellar space, which it is expected to reach sometime in the 2040s.

The patch of night sky containing New Horizons can be found by locating the famous "teapot" asterism at the heart of the constellation Sagittarius above the southern horizon in the hours following sunset in October. From a dark sky location, you may see the glowing band of the Milky Way extending overhead and running through the "spout" of the stellar teapot!

Next, look above the trapezium of stars that form the handle of the asterism and locate the star Pi Sagittarii using your smartphone astronomy app. New Horizons' location is roughly 1 degree to the upper right of this little-known star.

Voyager 1 — 15.72 billion miles (25 billion km) from Earth

Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever launched and became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space when it passed beyond the heliosphere (a giant bubble in our solar system created by the solar wind that protects the planets from cosmic rays) in August 2012, following a tour of Jupiter and Saturn. The spacecraft carries with it one of NASA's famous Golden Records, which contain a selection of greetings, images and sounds from Earth curated as both a time capsule and a method of establishing friendly first contact with any who may later find the distant probe.

Voyager 1's location in the night sky can be found by first locating the stars of the constellation Ophiuchus close to the western horizon in the hours following sunset in October. Next, locate the highest point of light in the constellation — the binary star system Rasalhague — and its neighbor Kappa Ophiuchi to the lower right. Voyager 1's approximate position lies half way along the imaginary line connecting these two stellar giants.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

New research investigates the possibility that different spacecraft could visit Comet 3I/ATLAS, giving scientists a unique on-location view of the interstellar visitor, or even offering the chance to collect material that could be much older than the bodies of our solar system.

Discovered on July 1 by the ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System), 3I/ATLAS is just the third-ever object found drifting through our solar system that is believed to have originated from around another star. It therefore offers scientists a unique opportunity to study material from another planetary system. However, recent examination of this interstellar intruder's trajectory and its velocity of around 130,000 mph (219,000 km/h) has revealed that it could actually originate from a region of our galaxy much older than the solar system and its immediate surroundings.

The fact that 3I/ATLAS seems to originate from the Milky Way's "thick disk" of stars means that it could be 7 billion years old or even older, making it at least around 2.5 billion years older than our sun, the planets of the solar system, and its horde of asteroids and comets. Thus, it represents the chance to study material that formed much earlier than that of the solar system during a period of the universe called "cosmic noon," an exciting prospect for scientists. But there is a problem.

Like the comets of the solar system do, 3I/ATLAS is shedding material as it approaches the sun, where solar radiation heats the ice at its core and converts it directly to gas, which erupts from the comet's surface. This process gives comets their distinctive tails and haloes (or "comas") and gives scientists a chance to assess what chemicals lie at the core of the comet.

A comet loses the most material when it comes closest to the sun, a passage known as its perihelion. The authors of this new research point out that when 3I/ATLAS makes its perihelion passage, it will be at the other side of the sun in relation to Earth.

That means that the telescopes that have been integral to the study of 3I/ATLAS will miss what will be potentially the most revealing period of its passage through the solar system. Earth-based telescopes like the four ATLAS telescopes located in Hawaii, Chile, and South Africa, and Earth-orbiting telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope have all studied the comet so far, but they will be out of view during its perihelion.

"A telescope on Earth will be at a huge disadvantage, as 3I/ATLAS will unfortunately reach its closest point to the sun behind the sun, if viewed from the Earth. It means that we would need to look through or past the sun to observe 3I/ATLAS," research author and University of Luxembourg researcher Andreas M. Hein told Space.com. "This is a big issue, as the sun is a very bright object and 3I/ATLAS is very faint. We would not be able to see 3I/ATLAS from Earth."

Thus, Hein and his colleagues, including lead author T. Marshall Eubanks, Chief Scientist at Space Initiatives Inc., set about assessing which spacecraft could avoid this issue and get an up close and personal view of 3I/ATLAS, or even pass through its cometary tail and collect some material.

"The Earth and its satellites, including our space telescopes, are, purely by chance, poorly situated to observe 3I/ATLAS when it is closest to the sun, as it will also happen to be on the far side of the sun as seen from Earth," Eubanks said. "The period at and just after perihelion is when a comet (including 3I/ATLAS) is heated the most, and thus throws off the most material, has the biggest tail, and has the highest chance of fragmenting, or even disappearing.

"Spacecraft offer a chance of observing this period."

What spacecraft could catch a glimpse (or a chunk) of 3I/ATLAS?

3I/ATLAS will pass within the orbit of Mars, which will allow several spacecraft from Earth to catch a glimpse of it. Eubanks pointed out that two interplanetary voyagers that are in prime position to observe 3I/ATLAS: the NASA mission Psyche, heading to the metal-rich asteroid 16 Psyche located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter; and the European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) heading to the Jovian system.

"Thanks to its Venus gravity assist on Aug. 31, JUICE will be in the best position for the important period around the 3I/ATLAS perihelion, when observations from Earth will be the hardest," Eubanks explained. "Various spacecraft orbiting Mars, including the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), Tianwen-1, and Hope, all have both the vantage point and good equipment to provide good data on 3I/ATLAS.

"Of all of these, I think that the JUICE data near perihelion is likely to be the most critical."

The researcher added that at its closest approach, Psyche will be around 28 million miles (45 million km) from 3I/ATLAS, while JUICE will come to around 43 million miles (68 million km) from the comet. At their closest, the spacecraft orbiting Mars will be around 18 million miles (29 million km) from the comet.

All of these spacecraft will be much closer to 3I/ATLAS than the comet will ever come to Earth. The interstellar comet's closest approach to our planet is estimated to be 168 million miles (269 million km) on Dec. 19, 2025.

Eubanks added that 3I/ATLAS will also pass through the fields of view of the ESA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), NASA's PUNCH solar monitoring spacecraft, and the Parker Solar Probe as the comet passes near the sun. That means these spacecraft will provide scientists the opportunity to monitor the day-by-day behavior of 3I/ATLAS, albeit at larger distances and lower resolutions.

Other spacecraft may not get a good look at 3I/ATLAS, but could still play an important role in investigating the interstellar visitor.

"The Europa Clipper, Hera, and the Lucy spacecraft will all be exterior to 3I/ATLAS, with the sun being behind the interstellar object from their vantage point, which will mostly or entirely prevent them from imaging 3I/ATLAS," Eubanks said. "However, 3I/ATLAS will also provide the possibility that they will fly through the cometary tail of this body, providing a different means of studying it."

The likelihood of a spacecraft passing through the cometary tail of 3I/ATLAS will depend on how it develops.

"It depends on the direction of the tail. The Europa Clipper and Hera spacecraft are moving at a farther distance than 3I/ATLAS and may pass through its tail or observe it at a closer distance," Hein said. "Ideally, we would be able to do mass spectroscopy to find out about the composition of 3I/ATLAS. The results would tell us if 3I/ATLAS indeed has its origin in the thick disk.

"It's like an aeon-old fridge, which will open during the next months to release some of its contents."

A rare oppotunity to study the universe

Eubanks and Hein explained to Space.com just why scientists shouldn't miss this opportunity to study 3I/ATLAS and to potentially snatch some material from its tail.

"Stars in the galactic thick disk have formed billions of years earlier than those in the thin disk, which includes our sun," Hein explained. "If 3I/ATLAS has been ejected from a thick disk star system, it means that we could gain insights into it without flying there - something which we will not be able to do for the foreseeable future. Hence, observing 3I/ATLAS is a literal example of: If the prophet cannot go to the mountain, let the mountain come to the prophet."

Eubanks added that as far as scientists know, almost everything in the solar system was formed around 4.6 billion years ago, or afterwards, barring some small "pre-solar" grains in some meteorites that are older than the solar system.

"The oldest of these, the pre-solar grains found in the Murchison meteorite, are 'only' 5 to 7 billion years old. 3I/ATLAS should be considerably older than that," Eubanks continued. "The cosmic noon, the period in which it seems to have formed, a time of high star formation, can be observed with other galaxies, but at a distance of 6 billion light-years. Now, we can study it in our own solar system, many trillions of times closer."

As for just how rare an opportunity this is, even this team of scientists isn't sure. That's because we currently can't say exactly how many interstellar invaders from beyond the solar system are zipping through our cosmic backyard.

"Imagine being in a dark room. There might be all kinds of objects buzzing around, but you cannot see them in the dark, and hence, it is impossible to know how many there are. Telescopes are a bit like searchlights in a dark room that allow us to see some of those objects," Hein said. "Of course, this is just an analogy as real telescopes collect light instead of shining light on objects. Their resolution is limited, and a lot of them can only observe narrow spots. Hence, we still only get a sketchy picture of what is going on. This is basically the situation until recently.

"Some believe that those objects are fairly common, but I am skeptical. If similar objects had buzzed through the solar system, we would have observed them much earlier than in 2017 when we observed ʻOumuamua or 2019 when we observed 2I/Borisov."

Hein added that the Vera Rubin Observatory, which has just opened its eye to the cosmos, is acting as a sweeping searchlight that should be able to observe large parts of the sky, thus allowing scientists to identify many more interstellar objects.

"However, I believe that these objects are rarer than commonly assumed and particularly thick disk objects, as the number of thick disk stars is only a fraction of thin disk stars," Hein continued. "Hence, it might be decades or even longer until we may have another opportunity to observe a potential thick disk object."

Whether 3I/ATLAS is unique in the solar system or not, the team is clear that this is the first time we've been presented with a clear opportunity to study an object from cosmic dawn in our own backyard.

"This is certainly the first time we have been offered such an opportunity," Eubanks said. "This could be literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

Excitingly, 3I/ATLAS may leave behind fragments that allow it to be studied after it has departed the solar system to continue its voyage through the Milky Way.

"Due to the size of 3I/ATLAS, it may actually have satellites up to a distance intersecting with the orbits of Mars and Earth. Hence, we might be able to observe dust particles in the form of a meteor shower entering the atmospheres of Mars and Earth or even larger pieces of 3I flying past those planets," Hein concluded. "The coming months will be very exciting as more and more data from 3I/ATLAS will be collected. We hope that some of its mysteries will be solved!"

The team's research is available on the paper repository site arXiv.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe is no stranger to breaking records.

On Dec. 24, 2024, Parker made history by flying closer to the sun than any spacecraft in history. The probe reached a distance of just 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from the solar surface, entering the outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere, known as the corona. During this flyby, it also reached a top speed of 430,000 miles per hour (690,000 kilometers per hour), breaking its own record as the fastest ever human-made object.

Now, NASA has released remarkable video captured during the historic flyby, offering the closest views of the sun ever recorded. The new images were captured with Parker's Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe, or WISPR, revealing a never-before-seen view of the sun's corona and solar winds shortly after they are released from the corona.

"Parker Solar Probe has once again transported us into the dynamic atmosphere of our closest star," said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a statement accompanying the images. "We are witnessing where space weather threats to Earth begin, with our eyes, not just with models. This new data will help us vastly improve our space weather predictions to ensure the safety of our astronauts and the protection of our technology here on Earth and throughout the solar system."

WISPR's images revealed an important boundary in the sun's atmosphere called the heliospheric current sheet, where the sun's magnetic field changes direction from north to south. It also captured, for the first time in high resolution, collisions between multiple coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are major drivers of space weather, and are important in understanding risks to astronauts and technology on Earth such as power grids and communications satellites.

"In these images, we're seeing the CMEs basically piling up on top of one another," said Angelos Vourlidas, the WISPR instrument scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which designed, built, and operates the spacecraft in Laurel, Maryland. "We're using this to figure out how the CMEs merge together."

Before the Parker Solar Probe, NASA and its international partners could only study solar wind from afar, which is why the spacecraft has been instrumental in closing key knowledge gaps. It identified the widespread presence of "switchbacks" — zig-zagging magnetic field patterns — around 14.7 million miles from the sun and linked them to the origins of one of the two main types of solar wind.

Closer in, at just 8 million miles, Parker discovered that the boundary of the sun's corona is far more uneven and complex than previously believed.

But more remained to be discovered.

"The big unknown has been: how is the solar wind generated, and how does it manage to escape the sun's immense gravitational pull?" said Nour Rawafi, the project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. "Understanding this continuous flow of particles, particularly the slow solar wind, is a major challenge, especially given the diversity in the properties of these streams — but with Parker Solar Probe, we're closer than ever to uncovering their origins and how they evolve."

Prior to Parker Solar Probe, distant observations suggested there are actually two varieties of slow solar wind, distinguished by the orientation or variability of their magnetic fields. One type of slow solar wind, called Alfvénic, has small-scale switchbacks. The second type, called non-Alfvénic, doesn't show these variations in its magnetic field.

As it spiraled closer to the sun, Parker Solar Probe confirmed there are indeed two types of solar wind. Its close-up views are also helping scientists differentiate the origins of the two types, which scientists believe are unique. The non-Alfvénic wind may come off features called helmet streamers — large loops connecting active regions where some particles can heat up enough to escape — whereas Alfvénic wind might originate near coronal holes, or dark, cool regions in the corona.

"We don't have a final consensus yet, but we have a whole lot of new intriguing data," said Adam Szabo, Parker Solar Probe mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The Parker Solar Probe is built to endure extreme conditions — from the freezing cold of deep space to the intense heat near the sun. A key factor in its survival is the difference between temperature and heat. While space near the sun can reach temperatures of several million degrees, that doesn't necessarily mean there's a lot of heat. This is because the sun's corona is extremely thin, meaning there are fewer particles. Even though individual particles in the corona are incredibly hot, there aren't many. The probe, therefore, doesn't receive much heat.

"While Parker Solar Probe will be traveling through a space with temperatures of several million degrees, the surface of [its] heat shield that faces the sun will only get heated to about 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1,400 degrees Celsius)," write NASA scientists.

These temperatures are, of course, still incredibly hot, which makes its heat shield, the Thermal Protection System (TPS), essential. The shield is made from a carbon composite foam sandwiched between two carbon plates. Carbon is ideal for this purpose because it is both lightweight and able to withstand extremely high temperatures without melting.

"Tested to withstand up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,650 degrees Celsius), the TPS can handle any heat the sun can send its way, keeping almost all instrumentation safe," explained NASA.

Its structure allows it to endure intense heat while minimizing weight, making it crucial for a spacecraft that needs to travel at extreme speeds. The outer surface of the TPS is also coated with a white ceramic paint, which helps reflect as much solar energy as possible and further reduces the amount of heat absorbed.

A twisting, whirling streamer of plasma escaping the sun in the aftermath of a coronal mass ejection (CME) has been captured on video by the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter, and could provide vital clues about how magnetic energy that drives the solar wind and giant eruptions on the sun is released.

The twirling, helical streamer was spotted by Solar Orbiter on Oct. 12, 2022. It lasted for more than three hours, extending up to 2 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) in length, transporting plasma and magnetic energy away from the sun.

Solar Orbiter used its Metis instrument, which features a coronagraph to block the glare of the body of the sun, to allow Solar Orbiter to see just the sun's fainter outer atmosphere, called the corona, in both visible and ultraviolet light. It's the wispy corona, filled with streamers, that we can see from Earth during a total solar eclipse.

Helical structures have been caught on camera in the solar corona before, but they have never been observed in such detail or for so long. How the streamer developed is now offering solar physicists clues as to what drives the solar wind and CMEs.

Related: Earth's sun: Facts about the sun's age, size and history

Researchers led by Paolo Romano of the National Institute for Astrophysics at the Astrophysical Observatory of Catania in Italy have studied the twisting streamer and traced it all the way back to its origin in the lower corona.

The picture that they present is this: At the base of the corona, magnetic energy becomes stored in taut magnetic field lines. The corona is full of holes, like Swiss cheese, where the magnetic field lines are open — this, they extend out into space rather than bending back onto the sun's surface (called the photosphere) in a closed loop.

The solar wind blows through these coronal holes. A phenomenon known as interchange reconnection takes place, which is the magnetic reconnection (where magnetic field lines break and then reconnect, releasing energy) between open and closed magnetic fields in the lower part of the corona. The most powerful reconnection events can liberate enough energy to produce solar flares and exploding magnetic filaments that result in CMEs.

On a smaller scale, interchange reconnection powers a constant and global population of jets that inject energy into the corona and through the coronal holes. These jets energize magnetic waves in the solar plasma called Alfvén waves, which in turn push plasma around and through the coronal holes, in the process ejecting matter on the solar wind that blows through those holes.

So where does the twisting streamer come into play? Based on observations by Solar Orbiter and its partner in crime, NASA's Parker Solar Probe — which gets so close to the sun as to actually dip into the corona — solar physicists have become convinced that the magnetic structure of escaping plasma from a massive interchange reconnection event is in the form of a "twisted flux rope."

A flux rope is a tube of magnetic energy that has erupted in a solar filament, which is a lace or channel of plasma held by closed magnetic fields. Interchange reconnection between the filament and the surrounding open magnetic field lines releases the energy that powers a CME, the resulting ejection being a powerful jet that bursts through the solar corona and into space, dragging plasma with it to form the CME. This flux tube forms the bright center of a CME.

And that's exactly what Solar Orbiter witnessed: the twisting flux tube in the aftermath of a powerful interchange reconnection event that released a giant CME into space.

Related: Space weather: What is it and how is it predicted?

According to computer simulations, the twisting nature of the flux tube is a natural consequence of a long-duration interchange reconnection. Solar Orbiter's observations with Metis revealed more, however. The inclination, or tilt, of the twisting features in the escaping flux tube decreases with height above the sun, indicating that the magnetic field lines are growing more radially aligned with the sun as they propagate out into the solar system. Perturbations in the magnetic field carried by the streamer might then become amplified as they carry on deep into space.

Romano's team speculate that it could be these perturbations that create the magnetic switchbacks, where the direction of the magnetic field in the solar wind suddenly reverses course before continuing onward in a kind of zig-zagging motion, as seen by both Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe.

For decades, the sun's greatest mysteries — how the solar corona is heated to more than a million degrees Celsius, for example, and where the energy comes from to drive the solar wind and CMEs — were closely held secrets. Now that Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe are getting as close to the sun as it's about possible to get, at long last the sun is giving up its greatest enigmas.

The academic research paper describing Solar Orbiter's observations of the twisting streamer was published March 26 in The Astrophysical Journal.

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.

On New Year's Day, NASA's Parker Solar Probe added to the festive cheer by sending home more good news about its record-breaking closest-ever approach to the sun.

On Wednesday (Jan. 1), mission control at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland began receiving the Parker Solar Probe's first telemetry — or housekeeping data — that confirms Parker's systems and science instruments are "healthy and operating normally" after its historic rendezvous with the sun, NASA shared in an update on Thursday (Jan. 2).

"All is looking good with the spacecraft systems and instrument operations," Michael Buckley, a spokesperson at JHUAPL, which oversees the Parker Solar Probe mission, told Space.com in an email. "It really is a remarkable spacecraft!"

The latest telemetry transmission also confirms the Parker Solar Probe successfully carried out the commands programmed into its flight computers and that its science instruments were functioning during the flyby, according to the statement. That means the spacecraft collected valuable data about our star as it swooped to within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun's surface — the closest yet a spacecraft has ever gotten to our star.

"While Parker Solar Probe was closer to the sun than any other human-made object in history, it operated just as it was designed to do, and made observations that no one has been able to make before," Helene Winters, the program manager for the Parker Solar Probe mission at JHUAPL, said in the statement.

The telemetry transmission, which mission control is receiving through NASA's Deep Space Network, continues through Thursday, Buckley said. The probe should beam home its collected science data later this month, when its most powerful onboard antenna will be in better alignment with Earth to transmit at higher rates.

"The data that will come down from the spacecraft will be fresh information about a place that we, as humanity, have never been," Joe Westlake, the director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a Dec. 27 update. "It's an amazing accomplishment."

On Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe hurtled through the scorching solar atmosphere while traveling at a maximum speed of 430,000 miles per hour (690,000 kilometers per hour) — fast enough to travel from Tokyo to Washington, D.C. within a minute — breaking its own record as the fastest object ever built.

Scientists were out of contact with the probe during the rendezvous, and just before midnight on Dec. 26, they received a simple yet much-anticipated beacon tone indicating the spacecraft survived the encounter and is operating normally. Thanks to a custom, 4.5-inch-thick (11.4-centimeter-thick) heat shield, the spacecraft could successfully endure temperatures up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius), NASA previously said.

Scientists hope data from Parker will help them decode longstanding mysteries about our sun, such as why its tenuous outer atmosphere, the corona, gets hundreds of times hotter the farther it stretches from the sun's surface.

"The data is so important for the science community because it gives us another vantage point," Kelly Korreck, a heliophysicist at NASA Headquarters who worked on one of the mission's instruments, said in the statement. "By getting firsthand accounts of what's happening in the solar atmosphere, Parker Solar Probe has revolutionized our understanding of the sun."

The spacecraft is scheduled for two more flybys in 2025 at approximately the same speed and distance from the sun — on March 22 and June 19.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe is alive!

Two days after a historic Christmas Eve sun flyby during which it passed closer to the star than any spacecraft in history — taking the car-sized spacecraft nearly a tenth as close to the sun than Mercury — the Parker Solar Probe then phoned home for the first time since its solar encounter. The space probe sent a simple yet highly-anticipated beacon tone to Earth just before midnight late Thursday (Dec. 26).

Scientists on Earth had been out of contact with the Parker Solar Probe since Dec. 20, when the spacecraft began its automated flyby of the sun, so the signal is a crucial confirmation that the spacecraft survived, and is in "good health and operating normally," NASA shared in an update early Friday (Dec. 27).

Mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland received the signal just before midnight ET on the night of Dec. 26, the statement read.

The spacecraft is programmed to send home a more detailed status update on New Year's Day, Jan. 1. It's only then that scientists will know whether the spacecraft indeed collected the expected observations of the sun from the flyby, Michael Buckley, a spokesperson at JHUAPL, which oversees the Parker Solar Probe mission, told Space.com in an email. "This gives the team a better picture of overall spacecraft and subsystem/instrument health, including whether Parker's data recorders are full."

The probe should transmit the bulk of the images and science data in late January, when it will have swung away to a safe distance from the sun.

Around 6:53 a.m. EST (1153 GMT) on Christmas Eve, the spacecraft accomplished what it was designed for: It swooped to within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun's surface. And it did so while traveling at a whopping 430,000 mph (690,000 kph) — breaking its own personal best as the fastest object ever built by humanity.

"It's just a total 'Yay! We did it' moment," Nicola Fox, NASA's associate administrator for science missions, said in a video update on Dec. 24.

The fact that the spacecraft survived such a close pass by the sun is a testament to the mission team's engineering, including a custom, 4.5-inch-thick heat shield and an autonomous system that protects the probe from the sun's intense heat while allowing it to point toward our star and let the coronal material touch the spacecraft. While the heat shield allows the spacecraft to endure temperatures up to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,371 degrees Celsius), the probe likely ended up experiencing lower — but nevertheless sizzling — temperatures of up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius), the mission team has previously said.

"No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory," Nick Pinkine, the Parker Solar Probe mission operations manager at APL in Maryland, said in a Dec. 20 statement.

Since its launch in 2018, the Parker Solar Probe has helped decode longstanding mysteries about our star, chiefly why its outermost layer, the corona, gets hundreds of times hotter the farther it moves from the sun's surface. Enroute to the sun, the probe serendipitously also caught rare closeups of passing comets and shed light on how Venus, Earth's hellish twin, may have lost its water.

On Christmas Eve, scientists expect Parker to have flown through plumes of plasma still attached to the sun. It may have also observed different types of solar winds and solar storms thanks to ongoing increased turbulence on the sun's surface, the mission team told reporters earlier this month at the annual AGU meeting.

"We can’t wait to receive that first status update from the spacecraft and start receiving the science data in the coming weeks," Parker Solar Probe program scientist Arik Posner at NASA Headquarters in Washington said in the statement.

On the heels of a NASA spacecraft's historic close flyby of the sun on Christmas Eve, scientists on Earth have one question on their minds: Did their probe survive as an epic Christmas gift, or is it a burned up lump of coal in space?

For a few days, they simply won't know, at least not until the spacecraft — NASA's Parker Solar Probe — phones home with a simple "status beacon" on Friday (Dec. 27) to let its science team know it's okay. But scientists behind the spacecraft's sun flyby on Dec. 24 are confident their spacecraft would survive the trip.

"Right now, Parker Solar Probe has achieved what we designed the mission for," Nicola Fox, NASA's associate administrator for science missions, said in a video update on Tuesday. "Right now, Parker Solar Probe is flying closer to a star than anything has ever been before and is the orbit that we really designed the mission for."

The Parker Solar Probe flew within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the solar surface to "touch the sun" on Tuesday in what was the closest approach to the star by any human-made object. At the time, the spacecraft was streaking by the sun at a mind-blowing 430,000 mph (690,000 kph), making it the fastest spacecraft ever, NASA has said. It was expected to experience scorching hot temperatures of up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius) during the encounter.

But the entire flyby was automated. The last time scientists heard from the Parker Solar Probe was on Friday night (Dec. 20), when the probe sent a beacon transmission "indicating all spacecraft systems were operating normally," NASA officials said in a update at the time.

It won't be until around midnight on Friday (Dec. 27) when scientists expect to receive their next call from the spacecraft at its mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

"We expect the first signal from Parker after closest approach (again, like Dec. 20, a beacon that indicates little more than general spacecraft health); signal expected around midnight," JHUAPL spokesperson Michael Buckley told Space.com in an email. JHUAPL is overseeing the $1.5 billion Parker Solar Probe mission for NASA.

A more robust status update from Parker Solar Probe is expected on New Year's Day, Jan. 1, when the probe is programmed to beam its first telemetry and housekeeping data to Earth since the flyby. It's only then, Buckley said, that scientists will know if the spacecraft collected the expected observations of the sun from the flyby.

"This gives the team a better picture of overall spacecraft and subsystem/instrument health, including whether Parker’s data recorders are full," he wrote.

The Christmas Eve close flyby of the sun by the Parker Solar Probe was the pinnacle of the spacecraft's mission. NASA launched the probe in 2018 on a mission to study the sun like never before, but to do that the spacecraft had to get closer to the star than anything built by human hands in history. Scientists hope the probe will help explain why the outer layers of the sun's atmosphere, like its corona, are so much hotter than the surface of the star itself.

In order to get close to the sun, the Parker Solar Probe flew by Venus seven times to snag gravity boosts that accelerated up to its current speed. It also swung around the sun 21 different times, speeding up at getting ever closer with each pass. The Dec. 24 flyby marked the 22nd sun flyby by the Parker Solar Probe, and is the closest the probe will get to the star. It has at least two more orbits ahead at the same speed and distance from the sun, NASA has said.

“This is one example of NASA’s bold missions, doing something that no one else has ever done before to answer longstanding questions about our universe,” said Parker Solar Probe program scientist Arik Posner at NASA Headquarters in Washington in a Dec. 20 statement. "We can’t wait to receive that first status update from the spacecraft and start receiving the science data in the coming weeks."

If all goes well, the Parker Solar Probe's first science data from its Christmas Eve sun flyby should be transmitted to Earth in late January, mission officials said.

On Christmas Eve (Dec. 24), a NASA spacecraft made history by coming closer to the sun than any spacecraft ever has before.

This record-breaking feat was conducted by the Parker Solar Probe, which flew to within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun, braving the blistering heat of our star's outer atmosphere, the corona.

The flyby, which should have occurred at 6:53 a.m. EST (1153 GMT), was the 22nd time Parker had made a close passage to the sun. Though the NASA craft is expected to make at least two more flybys of the sun, this is the closest it has ever and will ever come to the star. And, to be clear, we say "should have" because NASA had to lose contact with the spacecraft during this flyby; the first proof that Parker survived will arrive on Dec. 27, according to the agency.

Parker is no stranger to smashing records. On Sept. 21, 2023, Parker hit a speed of 394,736 miles per hour (635,266 kilometers per hour) to cement its record as the fastest object ever built by humanity.

During its Christmas Eve passage, scientists say the sun-touching spacecraft would have been traveling at 430,000 mph (692,000 kph), also breaking its previously set speed record. For comparison, that is around 300 times faster than the top speed of a Lockheed Martin jet fighter here on Earth.

This incredible feat of speed could be reached thanks to the aid of seven gravity "boosts" from Venus flybys, the last of which occurred in November 2024.

The Parker Solar Probe continues its true mission

But breaking records is just a byproduct of Parker's main mission: to learn more about the sun. In particular, the spacecraft needed to brave the 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius) temperatures it will experience to collect data about the solar corona.

Scientists hope this data can help solve a long-standing mystery about the sun's outer atmosphere, which has troubled them for decades. The so-called "coronal heating problem" refers to the fact that, despite being further from the sun's primary source of energy (its core), the corona is much hotter than the sun's surface, the photosphere.

Our standard model of stars suggests that the closer one gets to the stellar core, where main sequence stars like the sun perform nuclear fusion to forge hydrogen into helium and release energy, the hotter it gets.

All the layers of the sun seem to stringently obey this rule — except the corona, which can reach temperatures in excess of 2 million degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 million degrees Celsius). Around 1,000 miles closer to the source of the sun's heat, the photosphere reaches a relatively balmy 7,400 degrees Fahrenheit (4,100 degrees Celsius). That's like finding out this Christmas that your chestnuts only roast when you drive them a mile away from an open fire!

Therefore, there must be an extra mechanism heating the solar corona, and scientists are understandably eager to discover what it is.

Parker will continue its mission, making flybys of the sun on March 22, 2025, and then its final planned flyby will happen on June 19, 2025.

During both of these approaches, the spacecraft will come almost as close to the sun as it did on Christmas Eve while traveling at a similar speed.

Our sun is far from the flawless orb of light we see in the sky. Spacecraft observations have long shown that, up close, the "surface" of our star rumbles with powerful eddies and is dotted with fiery sunspots that occasionally burp superheated material into space — a phenomenon that occurs even more frequently during phases of increased turbulence on our star, like the one we're experiencing now.

Scientists are hoping NASA's Parker Solar Probe will get a unique taste of the sun's wrath on Christmas Eve, when it will swoop within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun's surface — the closest yet a human-made object has ever gotten to our star. At this record distance, the probe is already expected to cut through plumes of plasma still rooted to the sun, akin to a surfer diving under a crashing wave.

The sun reached its most turbulent phase in its 11-year cycle just two months ago, so scientists are hoping it will unleash at least one solar flare that serendipitously passes through the same pocket of space as the Parker Solar Probe. Far from damaging the spacecraft, this would allow the probe to gather rare data about how the sun's charged particles are accelerated to near-light speeds and dissect the dynamics of space weather — insights that would be valuable not only for understanding our sun but also for studying stars elsewhere in the universe, scientists say.

Since Parker Solar Probe launched in 2018 on a historic and audacious mission to decode some of the sun's deepest secrets, it watched our star transition from a calm, so-called solar minimum to its current stormy state, marked by back-to-back solar flares this summer that sparked the strongest auroras in 500 years.

"The sun is doing different things that it did when we first launched," Nicholeen Viall, who is a co-investigator for the WISPR instrument onboard Parker Solar Probe, told reporters earlier this month at the Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). "That is really cool because it is making different types of solar winds and solar storms."

Viall and the rest of the mission team are confident the spacecraft will withstand solar flares, largely because the probe easily survived its strongest flare so far in September 2022, which occurred on the back side of the sun and out of sight of mission control.

"The Parker Solar Probe is designed for that," Nour Raouafi, who is the project scientist for the mission, told Space.com in a recent interview. The spacecraft "dealt with it beautifully," he added, about the 2022 solar flare. Flying in the wake of that flare, Parker's data confirmed the decades-old hypothesis that a coronal mass ejection acts like a vacuum cleaner, clearing dust out of its path and leaving behind a near-perfect vacuum.

Any flare barreling toward Parker Solar Probe will be seen not by the spacecraft itself, which will be incommunicado with mission control, but by other sun-observing spacecraft like the European Solar Orbiter. Scientists will know how Parker Solar Probe dealt with any such events when the spacecraft gets back in touch with mission control through a critical beacon tone on Dec. 27, followed by images as well as science data in the New Year.

The sun's turbulence is now such that the four science instruments onboard Parker may soon even study powerful solar flares occurring on top of each other, providing scientists with up-close data about the chaotic workings of our star.

"We are preparing to make history," Raouafi said at the AGU meeting. "Parker Solar Probe is opening our eyes to a new reality about our star."

There's this running debate among astronomers about whether our moon deserves a proper name. After all, it is the way of our solar system. Other moons each have monikers, like Phobos and Deimos, and there is certainly no planet named "planet" nor asteroid named "asteroid." Even worlds beyond our cosmic neighborhood have names, albeit often very boring ones. However, our moon's namelessness does have a silver lining: It forces us to remember that it is, indeed, a moon.

The same can't be said for the sun, whose name makes it easy to forget it's really an incomprehensible, scorching star. But on Christmas Eve this year, we'll be acutely reminded of the sun's cosmic nature thanks to a resilient little spacecraft on a spectacular journey through space: the Parker Solar Probe. On Dec. 24 at 6:53 a.m. ET, this conical explorer will fly dangerously close to none other than our glowing yellow sun.

"In 1969, we landed humans on the moon; on Christmas Eve in 2024, we are going to embrace a star," Nour Raouafi, project scientist of the Parker Solar Probe mission, told Space.com.

On Aug. 12, 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe toward the sun with the hopes of decoding a bunch of longstanding solar mysteries — perhaps the most perplexing of which concerns the fact that our star's atmosphere is weirdly hotter than its surface. What's heating it up? It seems unintuitive, doesn't it? In the audience on launch day was the late Dr. Eugene N. Parker, who revolutionized our understanding of solar physics before the solar probe began its expedition and indeed gave Parker its name to begin with; this marked the first time a spacecraft's namesake was present for liftoff.

Then, on Dec. 14, 2021, the agency announced that Parker Solar Probe successfully entered the sun's atmosphere, or corona, getting just about 6.5 million miles from the star's surface. This was monumental in itself, but since then, the spacecraft has continued to get closer and closer over 21 orbits around the sun, leveraging Venus' gravity to propel itself while breaking records left and right. For instance, it is officially the fastest-ever human-made object, reaching speeds pushing 394,736 miles per hour (635,266 kilometers per hour).

On Dec. 24 of this year, however, Parker Solar Probe will complete its closest pass to the sun to date, getting within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the object's surface while zooming at 430,000 mph (690,000 kph). Previous records will be shattered.

"What the Parker Solar Probe is about to do on Christmas Eve of this year is really unparalleled," Raouafi said. "We have been dreaming of this moment for over 16 years."

And, as Raouafi explains, this is likely as close as the probe will be getting.

"Even if technically we can get the spacecraft closer to the sun, we cannot do it because the heat shield is not big enough to protect the spacecraft," he said. "If you get closer, the shadow cone of the heat shield will be narrow, and potentially, parts of the spacecraft will be exposed to direct sunlight — and that's not something we want to do."

In darkness

There's an aspect to Parker Solar Probe's journey that, at first glance, seems like it'd cause a stir among mission members: The spacecraft will be off the grid during the major flyby; we will have no way of contacting it.

Its first proof of life won't arrive before Dec. 27, when a beacon tone will essentially alert the team that Parker Solar Probe survived its trip through the sun's corona and is able to speak. The goods, though (scientific data and images) won't start pouring in until the new year. John Wirzburger, mission systems engineer for Parker Solar Probe, doesn't see this as a major issue. He actually welcomes the silence.

"This has been a great time for people to actually decompress — to take a break — because they know when they come out the other side, we have to get all the science data off and reconfigure the spacecraft," he told Space.com. "So, this encounter is almost like a built-in respite for us."

The dark period of Parker's excursion is of course in part because of the specific trajectory of the probe — it won't be in a great position to relay information back to Earth via NASA's Deep Space Network — but it's also because of the project's scientific goals.

"Because we are so close to the sun, the sun interferes with our communications," Wirzburger said. "But the other thing is, we don't want our communications to interfere with our science collections."

Nevertheless, Raouafi believes Parker Solar Probe's presence will be permeating the room for many scientists, even if through aromas of gingerbread and Scotch tape.

"Trust me, everybody will have in their minds and hearts Parker Solar Probe, and be thinking how that little thing is doing in front of the giant that is our star," he said. "I mean, we have been living with this mission for almost 16 years."

Those thoughts, however, will hopefully echo the Christmas spirit. Like learning to put faith in a child's ability to channel good decisions as they grow up and experience the world, the Parker Solar Probe team's trepidation about sending their robotic explorer so close to the sun has softened into pride over the years.

"Early in the mission, whenever we went close to the sun, I think we were pretty nervous," Raouafi said. "But now we did its 21st orbit, and the system is really doing way better than we thought it would."

No fear; no trembling

The most obvious worst case scenario for Parker Solar Probe in the coming days is probably something like … "Will it explode?" or "Will it just never speak to us again?" Yet neither Raouafi nor Wirzburger are particularly afraid of those outcomes as they say they're very unlikely, especially given the spacecraft's grit and tenacity over the last few years.

"I think the thing that would hurt me the most is not having collected science data through this pass," Wirzburger said, though adding that such pain would only last for the duration of the next orbit: "It's only a three-month hurt from the standpoint of we will jump on it and figure out what needs to be done for orbit 23 in order to remedy that situation."

And in fact, Raouafi is specifically hoping the sun tests Parker Solar Probe's strength as much as possible. The spacecraft launched when our sun was at the beginning of its 11-year solar cycle — a time known as solar minimum, when the sun is at its least active — but it's currently nearing solar maximum, when it's at its most active.

"My hope is the sun will give us one of these big explosions — really humongous explosions — when Parker Solar Probe is so close to it, and let it deal with it," he said. "I'm really hoping for Parker Solar Probe to give us one of the greatest gifts ever."

As to those gifts? Well, the probe has already sprinkled in a few over the last several years. For example, on Sept. 5, 2022, it flew straight through an enormous coronal mass ejection, which you can think of as a blob of plasma that bursts off the sun. This revealed that when one of these events occurs, it literally gives space a deep clean. These ejections appeared to sweep away any and all dust particles in its way, and the mission's crewmembers will be keeping their eyes peeled in case this kind of event is caught on camera again.

"We have other observatories observing the sun at that time; we have data from them. If there is, for example, a big flare or a big coronal mass ejection going toward Parker Solar Probe, we will know about it," Raouafi said. "And you will know about it almost real time, except that we have to wait to learn how Parker Solar Probe dealt with it."

Understanding these events in general is quite important when we consider space weather events; coronal mass ejections, especially when pointed at our planet, can accelerate particles to astonishing speeds. If and when those particles reach us, they can be super hazardous to astronauts in space and pose threats to our power grids.

Fascinatingly, Parker Solar Probe is helping engineers in an indirect way as well; this entire mission is sort of pushing a spacecraft to some of the most extreme limits possible. That means data about the probe's flight patterns and dynamics can inform future missions that may be exposed to intense space environments, like any that intend to explore the regions around Jupiter or Saturn where radiation levels are supremely high.

"We have to actively cool our solar arrays; we pump deionized water through them to keep them cool," Wirzburger said. "Can other missions adopt this? Maybe not for survivability, but for efficiency reasons."

Given all of this stress, you may also think that Parker Solar Probe is pretty worn down (I certainly did) but that couldn't be farther from the truth. Oddly enough, the sun has been acting like a nice car wash for the spacecraft.

"Basically, we take all of our parts and we bake them out to try to remove contaminants and get them nice and clean before we launch them," Wirzburger said. "But we're sending them to one of the best ovens in the solar system, close to the sun."

"We actually believe — especially with the thermal protection system — the shield up top is actually cleaner today than it was when we launched it," he added. "We think the spacecraft probably looks very beautiful and has a very nice white TPS [thermal protection system] on top."

With the exception of some minor dust damage to one of its instruments, and a few micron-size particles that have shot off its body when impacted by classic deep space debris, Parker is in stellar (ha) health.

"The system is basically behaving like we launched it yesterday," Raouafi said. "It's doing so well."

A true star

It isn't just a philosophical wonder that our sun is a star among billions of trillions of others in the universe; it's also a practical concept for astronomers.

"We are using the sun as a laboratory to study other worlds out there," Raouafi said, emphasizing that what Parker Solar Probe finds can remotely explain the intricacies of the billions upon billions of other stars out there in the universe. And indeed, the team hopes that it will continue revealing those intricacies in tandem with the discoveries other scientific fields make about the cosmos for a long, long time.

The probe likely has enough fuel to theoretically allow it to continue working for tens of years — potentially even a hundred years — so long as it remains in orbit around the sun. Per Wirzburger, that fuel supply is enough to maintain the spacecraft's momentum but can't quite allow scientists to alter the spacecraft's trajectory. This means Parker will probably remain a solar explorer, at least for as far as we can see.

"It's not that the spacecraft will be catapulted out and just be thrown out of the solar system or anything like that, or that we're spiraling in," Wirzburger said. "So, for the foreseeable future, we are in our final orbit, and it will maintain that orbit for a long time to come."

"There is a possibility, in the 2032 timeframe, that we potentially could get back to Venus," he speculated. "This is predicated on NASA; on what they would like to do — but the question that comes is, if we can get back to Venus, then what?"

In a sense, when you know it has a finish line, limbo is a nice space to find yourself in because it offers a small sample of reprieve during which your imagination can take charge. Surely, it is the bottomless imaginations of scientists that brought us to this historic moment in the first place.

"When I grew up as a young scientist and I got involved in space," Raouafi said, "I heard about the previous at least one or two attempts of trying to implement a solar probe — and when they all didn't come to fruition, it was really a sour taste.

"For me, the dream was to see this mission happening in my lifetime — but for us to be involved with it so deeply, and also to be leading it, it's more than a dream; we are dreaming with our open eyes."

Update 12/23: The flyby is currently scheduled to occur at 6:53 a.m. ET.

A NASA spacecraft is about to give astronomers an epic early Christmas present with the closest ever flyby of the sun on Dec. 24, but if you're wondering exactly when the ambitious solar encounter will occur, don't worry. We've got you covered.

The NASA spacecraft, called the Parker Solar Probe, is on course for what will be a record-setting close flyby of the sun on Christmas Eve, when it will fly through the star's outer atmosphere at 6:53 a.m. EST (1153 GMT) and pass within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the star's surface The flyby is the final trial for the Parker Solar Probe, which has made a series of ever-closer swings by the star (and seven flybys of Venus) on its mission to understand the sun like never before.

"No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory," said Nick Pinkine, Parker Solar Probe mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) in Maryland, in a statement. "We're excited to hear back from the spacecraft when it swings back around the sun."

What time will NASA's Parker Solar Probe fly through the sun?

As mentioned above, the Parker Solar Probe's closest sun flyby will occur on Tuesday, Dec. 24, at 6:53 a.m. EST (1153 GMT). At that exact time, the spacecraft will be at its closest point it will ever be to the sun: 3.8 million miles.

The Christmas Eve flyby will mark Parker's 22nd close encounter with the sun since its launch in 2018 (the first time it "touched the sun" was in 2021). The spacecraft will be flying at about 430,000 mph (692,000 kph), a mind-blowing speed which it reached by accelerating up via gravity assists from its seven Venus flybys, most recently in November.

During the Dec. 24 sun flyby, the Parker Solar Probe will fly through the sun's corona, its super-hot outer atmosphere, to study exactly why the region is so hot and other solar phenomena. The spacecraft has already set a new record as the closest human-built object to fly so close to the sun, and is flying seven times closer to the star than any other spacecraft.

Can I watch the Parker Solar Probe sun flyby online?

No, you will not be able to watch the Parker Solar Probe's sun flyby live online.

Unlike NASA rocket launches and Mars landings, the sun flyby will not be webcast or livestreamed in real time. Instead, NASA and the Parker Solar Probe mission team are providing updates on the spacecraft's status online in several places.

You can follow NASA's Parker Solar Probe mission blog (the agency's mission website is also a good place for details) or find updates at the JHUAPL Parker Solar Probe site. You can also find updates on NASA's @NASASun X page.

While you can't watch the Parker Solar Probe's flyby live, you can track the spacecraft's progress online. NASA's Eyes On The Solar System Parker Solar Probe page allows users to follow the spacecraft and see where it is any any given time.

JHUAPL also has a great walkthrough of the Parker Solar Probe sun flyby called "A Star Explored," that serves as a great guide to the flyby and mission.

How hot will Parker Solar Probe get during its sun flyby?

Christmas Eve may be a good time to roast chestnuts on the fire (or maybe toast marshmallows), but Parker Solar Probe scientists have built their spacecraft to avoid getting burned by the sun.

During its Dec. 24 flyby, the Parker Solar Probe is expected to experience temperatures of up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius) as it swings by the sun. But the spacecraft can take the heat.

The Parker Solar Probe's spacecraft components and science instruments are protected by heat shield that is 8 feet wide (2.4 meters) and 4.5 inches (11 centimeters) thick. The shield, made of a type of carbon foam, is positioned on the sun-facing side of the spacecraft and is designed to withstand temperatures of up to 2,500 F (1,377 C).

"One yard behind that, where the body of the spacecraft resides, it is almost room temperature," JHUAPL mission officials wrote in an overview. "And all its systems will need to work perfectly for Parker to gather data from this dynamic environment near a star where no spacecraft has dared travel."

And in case you're wondering about the max temperature fo the sun, our guide on how hot is the sun is can answer those questions.

How long is Parker Solar Probe's sun flyby?

This Christmas Eve sun flyby is pretty fast. (What else would you expect from a spacecraft traveling at 430,000 mph?) But for the Parker Solar Probe mission team, the actual encounter will last over a week.

"This is one example of NASA's bold missions, doing something that no one else has ever done before to answer longstanding questions about our universe," said Arik Posner, Parker Solar Probe program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in the Dec. 20 statement. "We can't wait to receive that first status update from the spacecraft and start receiving the science data in the coming weeks."

Here's a rundown of when to expect updates from the Parker Solar Probe.

Friday, Dec. 20

For Parker's mission controllers, the encounter began in earnest on Friday, Dec. 20. That's when the Parker Solar Probe sent its final signal to Earth indicating it was beginning the flyby.

"Mission operators at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, received a beacon transmission from Parker, through NASA’s Deep Space Network complex in Canberra, Australia, at 7:20 p.m. EST today indicating all spacecraft systems were operating normally," NASA wrote in a update on Dec. 20.

That's the last NASA and JHUAPL scientists will hear from the Parker Solar Probe until after the flyby, Space.com has learned.

Tuesday, Dec. 24

This is Parker Solar Flyby day. The mission team will be out of contact with the spacecraft, but it should be executing its programmed actions to perform the flyby.

At the time of the flyby, be on the lookout for a potential video or statement release from NASA and JHUAPL mission team members to mark the event.

Friday, Dec. 27

Only on Friday, Dec. 27, do NASA and JHUAPL mission controllers expect to hear their first signal from the Parker Solar Probe after its flyby.

Don't expect much, like new photos or sun videos. This check in from the Parker Solar Probe is expected at midnight and will be a beacon only to indicate the spacecraft made it through the flyby and include some status on its "general health."

Thursday, Jan. 1, 2025

Happy New Year! To ring in 2025, the Parker Solar Probe is expected to send its first telemetry and "housekeeping" data back to its mission operations center at JHUAPL.

The timing of this tag up from Parker is fluid as it will depend on where the probe is in its path around the sun, JHUAPL officials told Space.com. However, the contact here will again be a health checkup for Parker, allowing its mission team to check the spacecraft's systems and instrument health, as well as if its data recorders are full from the flyby.

The first science data downloads from Parker (like images or other observations) are not expected until late January, according to JHUAPL.

What happens after the Parker Solar Probe's sun flyby?

The Christmas Eve solar flyby of the Parker Solar Probe may be its closest sun flyby of its mission, but it won't be the last.

In all, the $1.5 billion Parker Solar Probe mission is designed to make at least 24 close flybys of the sun. This Dec. 24 flyby is No. 22. After this encounter, the spacecraft is expected top make at least two more sun flybys before its seven-year primary mission ends in 2025.

The next sun flyby by Parker will be on March 22, 2025. The final scheduled flyby, called "Perihelion 24," will be on June 19, 2025. Both of those future flybys are expected to approach the sun from a similar distance as the Dec. 24 event.

"The spacecraft will remain in this orbit for the remainder of its primary mission, completing two more perihelia at about the same distance and speed — a record 430,000 miles (692,018 kilometers) per hour — in March and June 2025," JUAPL officials wrote in November after the final Venus flyby. "After that, the team will decide whether to keep the spacecraft in that orbit or reposition it."

On Christmas Eve, NASA's Parker Solar Probe will swoop within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun's surface at a whopping 430,000 mph (690,000 kph), breaking its own records for speed and closest approach to our star.

The spacecraft, roughly the size of a small car, completed its final swing past Venus last month, setting it on a path to come closer to the sun than any human-made object ever has before.

On Dec. 24, the Parker Solar Probe is expected to cut through plumes of plasma that are still rooted to the sun and even fly through a patch of a solar eruption, akin to a surfer diving under a crashing wave. In October, the sun reached its most turbulent phase in its 11-year cycle, meaning the spacecraft will soon get to study powerful solar flares occurring on top of each other, providing scientists with up-close data about the chaotic workings of our star.

"We are preparing to make history," Nour Rawafi, who is the project scientist for the mission, told reporters at the Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) on Tuesday (Dec. 10). "Parker Solar Probe is opening our eyes to a new reality about our star," he said, adding the data sent home by the probe "is going to take us decades to sort through."

Related: Parker Solar Probe: First spacecraft to 'touch' the sun

The probe's Christmas Eve feat is expected to occur at 6:40 a.m. EDT (1140 GMT), but mission control will be out of contact with the spacecraft at this time. Shortly before and after the closest approach — on Dec. 21 and Dec. 27 — scientists will look for a beacon tone from the probe that will confirm its health. If all goes to plan, the first images following the encounter may come as soon as the New Year kicks in, with science data following in the weeks after, said Rawafi.

Since its launch in 2018, the probe has helped decode longstanding mysteries about our star, chief among them being how its tenuous outer atmosphere, the corona, gets hundreds of times hotter the farther it stretches from the sun's surface. In 2022, a chance alignment of the probe with Europe's Solar Orbiter spacecraft provided scientists the rare opportunity to study the same patch of solar wind, revealing how energy-packed plasma waves accelerate the solar wind to its unexpectedly high speeds.

Among its other discoveries, the Parker Solar Probe has also provided the first compelling evidence for the long-theorized but elusive dust-free zone around the sun, which is created by sunlight heating cosmic dust to high temperatures and turning it into gas.

A key reason for the spacecraft's good health for six long years and counting is the mission team's remarkable engineering, including a custom heat shield and an autonomous system that protects the probe from the sun's wrath even while pointing it toward our star to allow the coronal material to touch the spacecraft.

During its upcoming closest approach to the sun, the front of the heat shield is expected to reach a sizzling 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius). That's pretty hot, but the mission team is confident the spacecraft and its instruments can handle temperatures up to 2,500 degrees F (1,371 degrees C).

"It's really great to see all the science that is enabled by the fact that we overprepared," said Elizabeth Congdon, who is the lead engineer for the probe's thermal protection system. A specially designed white coating will reflect much of it back into space such that the spacecraft itself will witness relatively comfortable room temperatures, she added.

On Nov. 6, NASA's Parker Solar Probe passed within 234 miles (376 kilometers) of Venus' surface. The purpose of this close flyby was to accomplish a gravity-assist maneuver, in which the probe would steal some of Venus' momentum to change the spacecraft's orbit and bring itself even closer to the sun.

The Parker Solar Probe had already made several close passes of the sun, but the recent flyby was its closest, coming within about 3.8 million miles (6 million km) of the solar surface. That's less than nine times the radius of the sun.

At the moment of closest approach, Parker was traveling at nearly 435,000 mph (700,000 km/h), making it the fastest object ever designed by humans. To give you a sense of just how fast that is, Parker gives us the rare opportunity to switch units: We can reasonably express its speed as 0.06% the speed of light.

The goal of the Parker Solar Probe mission is to investigate the mysteries of the sun's corona, its outer atmosphere. Specifically, for decades, we've known that the visible surface of the sun, the photosphere, has a temperature of around a few thousand kelvins, but the corona itself is in the millions of kelvins.

Related: Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter team up to tackle 65-year-old sun mystery

The goal of the Parker Solar Probe mission is to investigate the mysteries of the sun's corona, its outer atmosphere. Specifically, for decades, we've known that the visible surface of the sun, the photosphere, has a temperature of around a few thousand kelvins, but the corona itself is in the millions of kelvins.

It's like switching on a light bulb, and the bulb is warm to the touch but the air around it is a thousand times hotter. What gives?

We know that the corona can't be heated through normal heat-transfer processes, because that would violate the second law of thermodynamics — the cooler surface can't deliver heat to the warmer corona. So it has to be some other process, and it has to involve magnetic fields, which play a large and dynamic role in the physics of the corona.

Ironically, it doesn't take that much energy to heat up the corona, and that's because of the role helium plays in the calculation.

Helium makes up about 25% of the sun's mass. The temperatures at the photosphere are cool enough that helium, which normally carries two electrons, loses one of them. We call this a partially ionized state. This allows helium to easily pump out a lot of radiation, which contributes to the general glowing of the sun. But it also keeps the temperature in check, because there's an easy "escape hatch" for the sun's heat.

Once things heat up a bit, however, the helium loses its other electron, and it becomes fully ionized. This makes it much, much harder to release radiation, which means it's much better at trapping heat. Solar physicists call this transition "evaporation" through an analogy with boiling water to make steam.

The upshot is that you don't need that much energy — something like 1 kilowatt for every square meter — to heat the corona to ridiculously high temperatures. That's like covering the surface of the sun in dishwashers, which amounts to less than 0.0025% of the total energy emitted by the sun.

This means that whatever we use to heat up the corona, we can be really, really inefficient with it and it will still likely do the trick.

And this is where the Parker Solar Probe comes in. To study this region of the sun, the probe comes with four suites of instruments, named FIELDS, WISPR, IS-O-IS and SWEAP. These instruments work together to study the corona itself, the solar wind (the stream of charged particles emanating from the corona) and the photosphere to compile a complete picture.

And this is how Parker discovered how strange waves of magnetic-field energy called switchbacks play a critical role in heating the corona.

A switchback starts in the turbulent photosphere, where plumes of plasma constantly well up to the surface and slink back down. Sometimes, regions of intense magnetic energy can form, where many field lines tangle up on each other. Some of these fields are straight, pointing away from the sun. Others loop back to the surface in the shape of a giant horseshoe.

When these two kinds of magnetic fields bump against each other, the lines can disconnect and reconnect, forming a giant S-shaped kink in the field lines. This kink, known as a switchback, travels away from the sun and deep into the corona.

Eventually, the switchback dissolves, delivering its energy. Astronomers think this is one of the most important — if not the most important — way the sun heats its corona.

This research is especially important because magnetic fields also control the evolution of space weather, which involves plasma storms that detach from the sun and go flying through the solar system. Space weather has a huge impact on satellites, human spaceflight and even our power grids. So the more we understand about the complex role of magnetic fields throughout all regions of the sun, the better we can predict and plan for solar storms of all kinds.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe should have completed its seventh swing past Venus on Nov. 6 — the spacecraft's final maneuver around the amber planet — in a flyby that nudged the probe onto a trajectory that will take it within 3.8 million miles of the sun's surface. That will be the closest that any human-built object has come to our star.

"We are basically almost landing on a star," Nour Raouafi, an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and project scientist for the Parker Solar Probe mission, told BBC News earlier this year. "This will be a monumental achievement for all humanity. This is equivalent to the moon landing of 1969."

The Parker Solar Probe, which is about the size of a small car, launched in 2018 on a daring mission to "touch" the sun. Scientists were hoping that it'd decode some of the hottest mysteries about our star, such as why the corona, the outermost layer of the sun’s tenuous atmosphere, gets hundreds of times hotter the farther it stretches from the sun’s surface. Indeed, the probe has already started unraveling some of these puzzles.

Gravity assists from Venus have been essential in nudging Parker closer to our star, as the spacecraft relies on the planet's gravitational tides to reduce its orbital energy and tighten its choreographed orbit around the sun.

"Venus 7 is the critical gravity assist for Parker Solar Probe to eventually achieve its minimum solar distance," Yanping Guo, who is the mission design and navigation manager Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland, said in a recent NASA statement.

While the probe is tailored to study the sun, these repeated swings past "Earth's evil twin" — which scientists say has not had enough robotic visitors in the past decades — have prompted Parker's operators to turn on its instruments and collect precious bonus science. During Parker's third Venus flyby in July 2020, for instance, scientists were surprised to find the spacecraft's camera could peer through Venus' dense clouds all the way to its surface, revealing distinct features, such as continental regions, plains and plateaus, carved onto the world.

The camera, called the Wide-Field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, or WISPR, also recorded the faint flow caused by heat emanating from Venus' nightside, which, at 860 degrees Fahrenheit (460 Celsius), would be "like a piece of iron pulled from a forge," Brian Wood of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. said in a NASA statement. Parts of the WISPR images also appeared brighter than expected, suggesting the camera might have picked up information about the Venusian surface not seen by previous spacecraft, such as subtle chemical differences on the surface or variations in age, possibly caused by recent lava flows.

To study the surface features in further detail, mission scientists once again pointed WISPR toward Venus on Nov. 6 as the Parker Solar Probe swooped within 233 miles (376 km) of the planet's surface.

"Because it flies over a number of similar and different landforms than the previous Venus flybys, the Nov. 6 flyby will give us more context to evaluate whether WISPR can help us distinguish physical or even chemical properties of Venus' surface," Noam Izenberg, a planetary geologist at APL, said in a recent NASA statement.

On Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe will graze the sun's "surface" — the photosphere, or sun's visible part — at a record 430,000 miles per hour (692,010 kilometers per hour). Mission control will be out of contact with the spacecraft during that time, but will be looking for a beacon tone on Dec. 27 that will confirm the success of closest approach and the spacecraft's health.

Our sun is far from the smooth, unvarying ball of light we see in the sky. Up close, its "surface" rumbles with powerful eddies that routinely burp superheated material into space. 

Astronomers have long wondered just how this blasted material — most commonly, streams of charged particles called the solar wind — heats up and accelerates to speeds of more than 310 miles (500 kilometers) per second — long after it exits the sun.

A team of heliophysicists have now found compelling evidence that energy-packed plasma waves known as Alfvén waves are capable of pumping enough energy into streams of solar wind to propel them to their unexpectedly high speeds. 

"This discovery is one of the key puzzle pieces to answer the 50-year-old question of how the solar wind is accelerated and heated in the innermost portions of the heliosphere," Adam Szabo, who is the Parker Solar Probe mission science lead at NASA and was not involved with the new research, said in a recent NASA statement. 

"It took over half a century to confirm that Alfvenic wave acceleration and heating are important processes, and they happen in approximately the way we think they do," added John Belcher, emeritus professor of physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-discovered Alfvén waves in the solar wind and was also not involved in the new research.

Related: Solar wind: What is it and how does it affect Earth?

The fresh clue to the decades-old mystery emerged thanks to a chance lineup of two sun-studying spacecraft that provided scientists a rare front-row seat to study the same patch of solar wind across two days. 

In February 2022, NASA's Parker Solar Probe detected a pocket of solar wind blasting from the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona. The probe, which is the fastest human-made object in history, recorded the wind to be traveling at 242 miles (390 km) per second along with an abundance of energy-packed Alfvén waves, which are known to transport energy throughout the solar wind the same way sound waves ferry energy via air on Earth. 

Two days later, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Solar Orbiter, which was then flying beyond the orbit of Venus, recorded the same patch of solar wind to be traveling even faster, at 317 miles (510 km) per second. Solar Orbiter's instruments showed that the Alfvén waves had nearly vanished, according to a paper published by the researchers on Aug. 29 in the journal Science. 

Study lead author Yeimy Rivera of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) in Massachusetts and her colleagues compared data from the two spacecraft. They found the energy gained by the plasma matched the energy lost by Alfvén waves, meaning the waves indeed pump enough energy into the solar wind to accelerate it. 

"Before this work, Alfvén waves had been suggested as a potential energy source, but we didn't have definitive proof," Rivera said in a statement by ESA.

"We didn't initially realize that Parker and Solar Orbiter were measuring the same thing at all," study co-author Samuel Badman, also of CfA, said in the NASA statement. "When we connected the two, that was a real eureka moment."

Scientists think the added energy arises from abrupt reversals in the directions of the sun's magnetic field called "switchbacks," which are known to become more distinct and powerful close to the sun. As solar wind ejected from the sun wafts away, Alfvén waves in the form of switchbacks provide energy sufficient to account for the observed acceleration and added heat of the stream, the new study found.

"These measurements told us that the energy from the switchbacks was both necessary and sufficient to explain the solar wind's evolution as it travels away from the sun," the researchers wrote in The Conversation.

Our sun, of course, is the only star in the universe whose wind scientists can study directly. "What we learned about our sun potentially applies at least to other sun-type stars, and perhaps other types of stars that have winds," said Badman.  

 For decades, scientists have puzzled over why the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, heats up as it moves further from the sun's surface. 

Now the long list of possible explanations has been trimmed down by one thanks to data collected by NASA's Parker Solar Probe, the fastest human-made object, which has repeatedly skimmed the sun as it hunts for clues to solve the so-called "coronal heating mystery."

 During the probe's first brushes past the sun, its instruments detected abrupt reversals in the direction of the sun's magnetic fields. Scientists call such instances "switchbacks" and suspect they play a role in heating the corona, primarily by releasing magnetic energy packed within them as they move within the sun and in space. 

Related: 3 sun mysteries we still haven't cracked

"That energy has to go somewhere, and it could be contributing to heating the corona and accelerating the solar wind," study co-author Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti of the University of Michigan said in a statement. 

The coronal heating mystery refers to the fact that the sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, is hundreds of times hotter than its "surface," the photosphere. That is despite the fact the photosphere is millions of miles closer to the sun's core where the nuclear fusion that provides our star's heat and energy occurs.

Depite being cooler than the corona, the photosphere is responsible for the vast majority of the light from the sun, completely "washing out" light from the solar atmosphere. Thus, the solar corona can only be seen when light from the photosphere is blocked by an eclipse or by using a special instrument called a coronagraph. 

That means to study the corona, the Parker Solar probe braves temperatures of around 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1,400 degrees Celsius) to get up close and personal with the sun.

Akhavan-Tafti and his team scoured data collected from over a dozen laps Parker did around our stars, searching for just where the switchbacks began, which is crucial to understanding their influence on the corona. 

However, the sought-after features were nowhere to be found, at least inside the corona. Instead, the probe's data showed switchbacks are a common occurrence in the solar wind near the sun.

The finding, which suggests the corona-warming switchbacks likely don't begin at the sun's surface, rules out one of two leading hypotheses on the switchback origin.  

Scientists think there could still be a trigger mechanism that contributes heat to the sun's outermost portion. One such mechanism could be explosive collisions of chaotic magnetic field lines on the sun's surface, said Akhavan-Tafti.

During such collisions, the magnetic fields vibrate like plucked guitar strings and accelerate plasma in the solar wind to high speeds. This could distort magnetic waves into switchbacks near the sun. If some of those waves lose steam before they exit the sun, however, their energy would be dumped in its upper layers, heating up the corona.

 "The mechanisms that cause the formation of switchbacks, and the switchbacks themselves, could heat both the corona and the solar wind," Akhavan-Tafti said in the news release.

This research fine-tunes our understanding of how the sun works and can eventually help scientists predict, detect, and prepare for solar storms. 

This research represents the latest result that has emerged from NASA's Parker mission since it began in 2018. 

Last month, the Parker Solar Probe completed its 20th close approach to the sun, inching within 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) from its surface, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which operates the spacecraft, said in a recent statement. 

The probe has since flown outward, but it will sweep back to the same distance on Sept. 30 and a million more miles further out from the sun on Christmas Eve this year. Scientists hope data from these trips will reveal more about why the million-degree-hot corona is the way it is. 

The team's research was published on July 29 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Scientists have long wondered why the hot soup of charged particles in our sun's atmosphere gets hotter moving away from the surface of the sun.

New research may have the answer, finding the super-hot nature of the sun's outer atmosphere or "corona" could be due to the intriguing behavior of small-scale waves in this nebulous plasma. These waves, known to scientists as "kinetic Alfvén waves" or "KAWs," are wave-like vibrations of magnetic fields manifested by motions in the sun's photosphere.

The findings could provide an important clue to decoding the seemingly physics-defying "coronal heating mystery" of why the corona is hundreds of times hotter than the visible solar "surface" or photosphere that radiates all the light we see from the sun.

The team behind this research, led by Syed Ayaz, a researcher at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, theorizes that as KAWs propagate, they dissipate and heat the sun's corona. Thus they serve as an important, albeit small-scale, mechanism by which energy is transferred within the sun's plasma.

Related: Watch a colossal X-class solar flare erupt from Earth-facing sunspot (video)

Ayaz said this phenomenon could explain why the sun's visible surface is around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius) while the corona, which marks the uppermost part of the sun's atmosphere, is over 2 million degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 million degrees Celsius). 

"For decades, Alfvén waves have been proven to be the best candidates for transporting energy from one place to another," Ayaz said in a recent statement. "So far, no solar spacecraft mission has provided predictions regarding these phenomena close to the sun."

How the corona heating mystery defies physics

The majority of the sun's energy comes from its core, where nuclear fusion occurs. That means the sun should get hotter as one moves deeper within it. Most of the layers of our star obey this principle. However, the corona, despite being millions of miles further away from the solar core than the sun's surface, is still vastly hotter than the photosphere.

Ayaz and his colleagues studied the influence of KAWs in the plasma floating up to an altitude equal to 10 times the sun's radius. At such distances, when the waves interact with the sun's charged plasma, which is packed with "ions," atoms that have been stripped of their electrons, they "rapidly dissipate, completely transferring their energy to plasma particles in the form of heating," Ayaz said.

The team's findings suggest energy from the waves can reach the corona and heat it, although just how much they contribute to the temperature of the corona remains to be seen.

 This new research "offers important insights into the critical problem of how energy in a magnetic field is transformed to heat a plasma comprising charged particles like protons and electrons," said Gary Zank, director of the Center For Space Plasma And Aeronomic Research at the University of Alabama who was not involved with work.

The findings of the latest study are strengthened by data from the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The SDO previously found that another kind of high-frequency, arch-like magnetic wave propagating through the corona can also dump large amounts of energy into the outer atmosphere of the sun over time, contributing to the heating of the million-degree-hot layer.

Similar processes that supply heat to the sun's corona were the focus of a recent NASA sounding rocket mission. The mission, named MaGIXS-2—short for the second flight of the Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrometer, was launched into space for a few minutes in mid-July to collect X-rays from the sun. 

Those rays are particularly telling of how often bursts of energy are released within our star, which may help scientists unveil more about how the corona is heated.

Even as scientists continue to piece together the puzzle of how the sun's corona gets so hot, other heating mechanisms related to the sun's magnetic field are being ruled out. For instance, scientists suspected certain S-shaped bends in the sun's magnetic field packed a lot of magnetic energy that is released into the surrounding plasma, heating it up and accelerating storm-sparking solar winds.

However, an analysis of Parker Solar Probe's first 14 laps around the sun reported in a separate paper published on Monday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters found no evidence of the sought-after feature inside the corona. 

Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti, a research scientist at the University of Michigan who led the study, noted in a statement that the Parker Solar Probe's upcoming trips into the sun, likely as soon as December this year, could reveal more insights into the decades-old mystery. 

The team's study was published last week in The Astrophysical Journal.

Underneath the arch of a huge coronal loop, a wealth of exotic solar phenomena active in the transition zone between the sun's lower atmosphere, the chromosphere, and the corona, have been recorded in this magical video by the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter spacecraft.

The view, recorded by Solar Orbiter from a distance of a little over 43 million kilometers (26.7 miles) from the sun, reveals features on the solar surface that we could have only dreamed about seeing 10 years ago. That's because Solar Orbiter and its NASA counterpart, the Parker Solar Probe, are designed to observe the sun from a much closer vicinity than any other mission before them.

In fact, Solar Orbiter reached its closest point to the sun 10 days after shooting this video. Parker Solar Probe will reach its closest point, of a mere 6.9 million kilometers (4.3 million miles), on Christmas Eve later this year. This might still sound like a huge distance, but when you consider that the sun is 1.39 million kilometers (864,600 miles) across, it's not that far at all. Actually, , it's so darned close that Parker Solar Probe will skirt the edge of the corona and endure temperatures of 1,377 degrees Celsius (2,500 degrees Fahrenheit).

Related: Sun unleashes X-class solar flare, radio blackouts reported (video)

But back to Solar Orbiter. This video, filmed on Sept. 27, 2023 with the spacecraft's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), shows several distinct types of features. The things to remember are that most activity on the sun is driven by the immense solar magnetism, and that much of it this activity involves temperatures so hot that it emits mostly in ultraviolet light. As the movie begins, the first notable feature you can see is a bright patch to the lower left. This is called "coronal moss." Commonly found at the base of coronal loops, which are magnetic loops that penetrate from the sun's visible surface (the photosphere) and form bridges across active regions that convey million-degree-hot plasma (ionized, or electrified, gas). The moss is so-named because when solar physicists first discovered it, it was a feature that  appeared spongy. 

Solar Orbiter's high-resolution vision, however, shows the moss instead to be a tangle of lace-like filaments of plasma that follow the jumble of magnetic field lines at the base of the loop, which is the site of an "active region." These regions are where sunspots can also be found, although sunspots are too cool to be seen in the ultraviolet light of this video. The brightest regions in the moss radiate in excess of a million degrees.

On the horizon of the solar limb we can see dark, spiky features. These hair-like structures are called spicules, and they are jets of plasma 300 kilometers (185 miles) across that can reach a height of 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) above the photosphere; they wave in time with the sun's gently oscillating magnetic field. Racing upwards at between 15 kilometers per hour and 110 kilometers per hour (9 miles per hour and 68 miles per hour), the millions of spicules that are present on the sun at any one time deposit huge amounts of plasma into the chromosphere and corona.

Twenty-two seconds into the video, something else happens. You'll see an eruption of cooler material that rises as a plume deep into the chromosphere before falling back down towards the photosphere. The violence and scale of this outburst is extraordinary; it might appear modest with respect to the rest of the sun, but that one eruption is larger than our entire Earth. 

Toward the end of the video, it's possible to catch another elusive solar phenomenon: coronal rain. Despite the name, this is not water. It's made of droplets formed of huge clumps of plasma, 10,000 degrees Celsius (18,000 degrees Fahrenheit) warm, falling out of the coronal loop and back onto the photosphere. The coronal rain appears dark only because, in contrast to the million-degree-hot corona around it, the rain is comparatively cold, creating a contrast effect similar to the dark sunspots.

What happens on the sun has repercussions farther out in the solar system, too, as eventually much of the energy witnessed here in this video is unleashed into space by driving the solar wind, made of charged particles. This solar wind encounters spacecraft, planets and moons, interacting with them (this is what gives rise to the northern lights, for instance). Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe are able to team up to study the solar wind, and it just so happened that, when Solar Orbiter shot this video, Parker Solar Probe was just 7.26 million kilometers (4.51 million miles) from the sun — Parker soon felt the solar wind that left the sun following the recording of this activity. With Solar Orbiter probing the source of the solar wind and where it gets its energy from, and Parker Solar Probe measuring the wind's gusts, solar physicists are able to get a clearer picture of how the solar wind forms and evolves as it flows away from our star.

Every so often, the sun's simmering magnetic field burps colossal clouds of plasma out into the space beyond. These are called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). If one CME strikes Earth, for example, the result can be spectacular auroras — and, just-as-spectacular disruptions of electrical grids and satellites.

Now, NASA's Parker Solar Probe has gotten a first-ever peek inside a CME as it erupted from the sun. And what lies inside appears to be a treasure trove for solar physicists. The probe's visible-light-detecting, Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR) instrument caught clear, turbulent eddies within the CME.

The eddies are what physicists call Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities (KHI). Physicists think KHI events occur whenever one patch of fast-moving fluid interacts with another. On Earth, KHI occurs in clouds when the wind speed at one end of the cloud is different from that at the other end.

Related: NASA's Parker Solar Probe smashes record for fastest human-made object

Solar physicists have inferred that KHI exist in CMEs, as plasma in a CME moves at odds with the background solar wind. But they have never had the proper equipment, in the proper place, to observe the phenomena.

"The turbulence that gives rise to KHI plays a fundamental role in regulating the dynamics of CMEs flowing through the ambient solar wind," said Evangelos Paouris, a solar physicist at George Mason University, in a statement. "Hence, understanding turbulence is key in achieving a deeper understanding of CME evolution and kinematics."

The Parker Solar Probe launched on Aug. 12, 2018. Since then, the probe's elliptical orbit has allowed it to enter the sun's corona closer than ever before — in essence, becoming the first human-made object to enter the sun's outer atmosphere, just 11.5 solar radii from the sun's surface.

And, even now, Parker Solar Probe has not entered its final orbit. The probe has repeatedly flown past Venus in order to use the planet's gravity to boost its speed and tighten its orbit around the sun. In November of this year, the probe will fly past Venus a seventh time, tightening its loop about the sun yet again — allowing it to pass within just 9.5 solar radii from the sun in 2025 and beyond.

Three months ago, scientists spotted tiny, short-lived energy jets surfacing from dark regions in the corona, the sun's outer atmosphere. 

Upon closer look, these jets appeared as bright flashes everywhere on the sun's disk. They lasted only 20 to 100 seconds but packed a powerful punch: A single minute-long jet carried energy equivalent to the power consumed by 10,000 homes in the U.K. in a year. 

These findings came from data gathered by Solar Orbiter, a probe operated jointly by the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA that has been capturing images of the sun since June 2020. The spacecraft's discoveries over the past three years, including the detection of "picojets" or "picoflares," were shared on Wednesday (Dec. 13) at the 2023 fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), a conference being held this week in San Francisco and online.

Related: Solar Orbiter: Seeing the sun like never before 

"What we see is just the tip of the iceberg," said Yannis Zouganelis of ESA, the deputy project scientist for the Solar Orbiter mission. 

Picojets barely stick out of the chromosphere — the layer just underneath the corona — so images of the sun have captured only their tips. Nevertheless, those images are helping scientists better understand how and where the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing continuously from the sun, originates. 

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These minuscule jets could also be contributing to coronal heating at some level, although it is still too early to confirm, Zouganelis added. If the jets are indeed involved, solar scientists would get a step closer to decoding the longstanding mystery of precisely why the sun's corona is a stunning 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (1 million degrees Celsius) hotter than its visible "surface."

Zouganelis said his team was also surprised by so-called campfires, slightly bigger, flickering flares the size of a European country sprinkled across the sun's disk. These were imaged by Solar Orbiter as soon as it began operations in 2020, marking the probe's first science discovery. 

"It's not that we haven't seen them before," said Zouganelis. "It's that we haven't seen as many."

The coming months could offer more clues to the longstanding coronal heating problem. In September, Solar Orbiter teamed up with another spacecraft, NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which studies the sun in a complementary manner. By combining remote-sensing observations and in-situ measurements in what scientists call a "scientific first," the two spacecraft could together offer more robust data needed to better understand the phenomenon.

The sun may be a little smaller than we thought it was.

Researchers who measure the sun often use total solar eclipses to block out most of its light and get a glimpse of its corona, or outer atmosphere. This method pegged the sun's radius at about 432,468 miles (695,990 kilometers), a measurement accepted as standard since the 1970s.

But to really understand the sun's physics and atmosphere, more precise measurements are needed. Because the sun is always in motion — it's a churning, convecting ball of fiery plasma, after all — waves are constantly traveling across its surface and through its bulk. In the 1990s, researchers measuring some of the oscillations caused by the waves, known as f-modes, found that the sun was somewhere between 0.03% and 0.07% smaller than the light-based solar eclipse methods suggested. (Different studies returned slightly different values.)

Related: Massive eruption on sun hurls coronal mass ejection toward Earth, auroras likely Sept. 19 (video)

Now, a new study measuring yet another type of solar wave oscillation known as a p-mode confirms that these studies from the 1990s were right: The sun is a little smaller than the standard estimates hold. According to the research, which has not yet been peer reviewed but was posted Oct. 17 to the physics preprint database arXiv, the sun's radius is more like 432,337.6 miles (695,780 km). That's a diameter of about 864,675.3 miles (1,391,560 kilometers). In essence, both the old f-mode data and the new p-mode measurements point to a similar size, the researchers concluded.

Those numbers are only a fraction of a percent different, but they are important. These waves and oscillations are a peek into the sun's nuclear reactions, chemical composition and basic structure, study co-author Douglas Gough, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, told New Scientist.

Without the right radius, "there's the potential to reach misleading conclusions about the subtle elements of the sun's internal structure," William Chaplin, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. who was not involved in the study, told New Scientist.

Understanding the sun is important not only because the sun is Earth's most accessible star (and the source of light and heat that makes life possible) but also because magnetic storms from the sun's surface can affect Earth's telecommunications. NASA's Parker Solar Probe is currently orbiting seven times closer to the sun than any other spacecraft ever has, in an effort to understand the solar wind that brings charged particles in contact with Earth's atmosphere. The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter, which launched in 2020, is also investigating solar winds and will take the first close-up pictures of the sun's polar regions.

The NASA Parker Solar Probe has become the fastest human-made object ever recorded — again.

On Sept. 27, the probe reached a blistering 394,736 mph/ (635,266 km/h) as it swooped close to the sun's surface, thanks to a little gravity assistance from a close flyby of Venus on Aug. 21. . With this blistering approach to the sun, the probe smashed its own previous speed record of 364,660 mph (586,863 kmh), set in Nov. 2021. At the same time, the probe set a new distance record, swooping within just 4.51 million miles (7.26 million km) of the solar surface — closer than any spacecraft has ever orbited before, according to NASA.

The Venus flybys are a crucial element of the probe's attempt to study the sun's scorching surface. As the probe zooms by Venus, the planet absorbs some of Parker’s orbital energy, allowing it to get closer to the sun. The probe has one more flyby planned; its closest approach to the sun in late 2024 is predicted to be just 3.83 million miles (6.16 million km) from the surface. The probe will likely reach even greater speeds on its final trip around the sun, firmly solidifying its reputation as the fastest human-made object ever.

Related: How ordinary spacecraft sensors could improve our understanding of space weather

The Parker Solar Space Probe, launched in Aug. 2018, is on a seven-year mission to understand the sun's corona, or the outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere. Understanding how heat moves through the corona, how plasma and magnetic fields change on the sun's surface, and how that powers phenomena such as solar wind will help scientists better predict space weather, according to NASA.

While zipping through space on its seven-year-long mission to investigate the sun, NASA's Parker Solar Probe may have finally picked up signals of the culprit behind Venus' mysterious "lightning" storms. The find happened in 2021, when Parker made a routine flyby of the windy world in an effort to harness the planet's gravitational pull and propel itself closer to its primary stellar subject. 

"Parker Solar Probe is a very capable spacecraft. Everywhere it goes, it finds something new," Harriet George, lead author of the new study and a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, said in a statement. 

In a nutshell, per a new paper on the 2021 Parker data, flashes of light on Venus that many experts associate with lightning bolts might not represent lightning bolts at all. Rather, they appear connected to disturbances in the magnetic fields surrounding the planet. Of course, that's not to say Venus doesn't have some lightning — perhaps just not as much as we once thought. 

"There's been debate about lightning on Venus for close to 40 years," George said. "Hopefully, with our newly available data, we can help to reconcile that debate."

Essentially, though Venus seems riddled with lightning bolts based on signals scientists have collected over time, something doesn't quite add up. For instance, a 2021 study, the statement says, failed to find the radio waves you'd expect to see from lightning on the planet — and a paper published in August of this year suggests some flashes of light typically attributed to Venusian bolts are actually meteors burning up in the planet's atmosphere.

Related: 'Lightning' on Venus is actually meteors burning up in planet's atmosphere, study says

Listen to the whistler waves

Basically, the way George and fellow researchers drew their conclusions about Venus' lightning — or lack thereof — is by tracing a phenomenon known as "whistler waves."

Whistler waves are fleeting pulses of energy expressed as electromagnetic waves that can propagate through various mediums; on Earth, for instance, they propagate through part of the atmosphere and generally last about half a second. But most importantly, on Earth, these whistler waves are specifically rooted in lightning discharges. 

So, when scientists noticed whistler waves on Venus for the first time in 1978 thanks to the Pioneer Venus spacecraft, it's understandable why they assumed Venus must have lots of lightning. So much, in fact, that many experts believed Venus must experience roughly seven times more lightning than our planet does, according to a statement on the new study.

"Some scientists saw those signatures and said, 'That could be lightning,'" George said. "Others have said, 'Actually, it could be something else.' There’s been back and forth about it for decades since."

After Pioneer's findings, the Galileo spacecraft found further evidence of lightning in 1990, yet Cassini's flybys in 1998 and 1999 failed to find the evidence of radio static on Venus you'd expect to accompany lightning. Then, Venus Express, the first European Venus orbiter, identified some promising proof between 2006 and 2014 that, yes, there is lightning on Earth's "evil twin." It's all very questionable, but the final answer about lightning bolts on Venus could be in sight — especially because Parker's data was collected when the probe was significantly close to the planet. It was only about 1,500 miles (2,414 kilometers) away.

As George explains, whistler waves don't necessarily have to be created by lightning — and when Parker flew by the straw-colored planet a few years ago, it got incredibly close and collected data that indeed suggested Venus' whistler waves do not come from lightning. 

The researchers saw those whistler waves heading downward toward the planet, not outward like the direction Earth's lightning-induced whistler waves move to propagate through the atmosphere. "They were heading backward from what everybody had been imagining for the last 40 years," David Malaspina, co-author of the study and an assistant professor at LASP.

From there, the team theorized that the waves stem from disturbances in the planet's magnetic fields. Or, more specifically, the idea is that magnetic field lines surrounding Venus may break apart then snap back together, in turn producing bursts of energy exhibited as none other than whistler waves. 

In 2024, Parker will make its seventh and final pass by Venus as it treads closer and closer to the sun. That flyby will bring it less than 250 miles above the Venusian surface. 

Hopefully that's enough proximity to settle the planet's lightning debate once and for all.

The paper detailing these findings was published on Sept. 29 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Coronal mass ejections (CMEs), or magnetic bursts of plasma from the sun’s corona, are fearsome indeed. They can drive high-energy space storms for millions of miles and endanger satellites, astronauts and even electronics within Earth’s atmosphere. So, engineers cheered when they learned the Parker Solar Probe drifted through a CME unscathed on September 5, 2022.

Scientists had a few science-focused  reasons to celebrate: Parker’s dangerous journey  offered the probe a golden opportunity to view a CME up close. And in fact, Parker’s observations helped scientists validate a two-decade-old theory. 

Related: Massive eruption on sun hurls coronal mass ejection toward Earth, auroras likely Sept. 19 (video)

As two scientists suggested in 2003, CMEs can push away interplanetary dust — the tiny detritus from planets, asteroids, and comets that is left to drift around the sun. Interplanetary dust is small and difficult to observe, but Parker’s Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) camera managed to pick out  light reflected off the particles. The specks of such light were  still very subtle, however, but scientists enhanced the signals  by  subtracting out the average brightness of images WISPR had taken during similar orbits.

When they did, they found  the CME blew dust away along an approximately 6-million-mile-long (9.7 million kilometers) path from the sun. Guillermo Stenborg, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and lead author of the paper, compared the observed effect to a vacuum cleaner. And just like a freshly vacuumed room, the gap in interplanetary dust quickly filled in with yet more interplanetary dust.

Whether all CMEs clean up dust in this way remains an open question. Since astronomers have only ever observed the phenomenon with this one 2022 event, Stenborg and colleagues believe that only the most powerful CMEs may be responsible for such tidying up.

Fortunately, the sun is approaching solar maximum, and Parker as well as other observatories may get more opportunities to observe these fearsome CMEs.

A paper on this research was published on May 31, 2023 in The Astrophysical Journal.

A new groundbreaking measurement made by the Solar Orbiter spacecraft and the Parker Solar probe brings scientists closer than ever to solving a longstanding mystery surrounding the sun. Oddly enough, our host star's atmosphere, or corona, is staggeringly hotter than the solar surface despite being further away from the obvious source of the sun’s heat — and this is a puzzle that has troubled physicists for about 65 years. 

The collaboration between these two instruments was made possible when the Solar Orbiter, operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) performed some space-based gymnastics. These maneuvers allowed the spacecraft to observe the sun and NASA’s Parker Solar Probe at the same time. Ultimately, that allowed for simultaneous solar observations between the two, which together indicated that turbulence is likely heating the solar corona to incredible temperatures.

"The ability to use both Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe has really opened up an entirely new dimension in this research," Gary Zank, co-author of a study on the results and a researcher at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said in a statement.

This team-up could finally solve the so-called "coronal heating mystery," which revolves around that heat discrepancy between the corona, made of wispy and nebulous electrically charged gas called plasma, and the sun’s surface, or photosphere. 

Related: Scientists may finally know why the sun's outer atmosphere is so freakishly hot

What is the coronal heating mystery?

The corona can reach temperatures as great as 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (1,000,000 degrees Celsius), while 1,000 miles below it, the photosphere only reaches temperatures of around 10,800 degrees Fahrenheit (6,000 degrees Celsius).

That is a troubling fact because the sun’s core, where the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium occurs, is where the vast majority of the sun’s heat comes from. This is like air about one foot above a campfire being hotter than  air  one inch away from the flames. 

The discrepancy in heat also means there must be another heating mechanism at play  directly on the corona. Until now, that mechanism has evaded scientists, but turbulence in the atmosphere of the sun significantly heating coronal plasma has long been considered a plausible explanation. However, that hypothesis had been impossible to investigate with data from one spacecraft. 

Satellites can investigate the sun in two ways: they can get up close and personal, making in-situ measurements like NASA’s Parker Solar Probe does, or they can make more remote investigations like the Solar Orbiter. The Solar Orbiter studies the corona from around 26 million miles (42 million kilometers) away from the sun, while the Parker Solar Probe braves the blazing hot plasma of the sun as it passes around 4 million miles (6.4 million km) from the solar surface.

But, there is a trade-off between the two approaches. 

Remote sensing can see broad details about the sun, but suffers when it comes to making observations of what physics is at play in coronal plasma. On the other hand, in-situ observations can measure that plasma in greater detail but tend to miss the bigger solar picture.

That means uniting the large-scale measurements of events on the sun from the Solar Orbiter with the detailed observations of the same phenomenon by the Parker Solar Probe could present us with the total picture of the sun with  all intricate details filled in  —  the best of both worlds. 

This isn’t as straightforward as it sounds, however. To facilitate this team-up, the Parker Solar Probe would have to be within the field of view of one of the Solar Orbiter’s instruments as the two observe the sun from their relative positions.

How scientists achieved the 'best of both worlds' to potentially solve a solar mystery

A team of astronomers, including Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) researcher Daniele Telloni, discovered that on June 1, 2022, the two solar observatories would be within touching distance of the desired orbital configuration to engage in such a team-up.

As the Solar Orbiter would be looking at the sun, the Parker Solar Probe would be just off to the side, only a little bit out of view of the ESA spacecraft’s Metis instrument  —  a device called a "coronagraph" that blocks out light from the photosphere to image the corona and is ideal for large-scale, distant observations.

To perfectly line up the two spacecraft and get the Parker Solar Probe in view of Metis, the Solar Orbiter performed a 45-degree roll and was then pointed slightly away from the sun. 

The data that was collected as a result of this well-planned maneuver authorized by the spacecraft’s operation team paid off, revealing turbulence that could indeed be transferring energy in the way solar physicists had theoretically predicted would be causing coronal heating. 

The turbulence drives coronal heating in a way that is similar to what happens when coffee is stirred here on Earth. Energy is transferred to smaller scales by random movements in a fluid or gas — coffee and plasma  —  and this converts that energy to heat. In the case of the corona, plasma is magnetized, and that means stored magnetic energy can also be converted to heat. 

The transfer of magnetic and movement or kinetic energy from larger to smaller scales is the very essence of this turbulence, and at the smallest scales, it allows the fluctuations to interact with individual particles, mostly positively charged protons, heating them. 

That isn’t to say the mystery of coronal heating is "case closed," however. Solar scientists still need to confirm the mechanism that has been hinted at by these results and by the collaboration between the Parker Solar Probe and the Solar Orbiter. 

"This is a scientific first. This work represents a significant step forward in solving the coronal heating problem," Solar Orbiter Project Scientist Daniel Müller said.

The team’s research was published on Thursday (Sept. 14) in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. 

Since 2021, NASA's Parker Solar Probe has been treading impressively close to the sun in order to capture unprecedented data about our home star. 

In fact, the record-breaking spacecraft completed its closest approach yet to the blazing ball of plasma in June, coming within just 5.3 million miles (8.3 million kilometers) of the solar surface. To reach these incredible milestones, Parker gets by with a little help from its friends. Well, one friend: Venus.

NASA says Parker is on track to make its sixth and closest flyby of Venus on Aug. 21, thanks to some precise maneuvering that took place on Aug. 3. The goal is for the probe to use the amber-hued planet's gravity to tighten its orbit around the sun — a technique Parker has been employing repeatedly during its mission, which began with a launch on Aug. 12, 2018. If all goes well with this Venusian approach, Parker will come within about 4.5 million miles (7.2 million km) of the solar surface on Sept. 27. 

But the story won't end there.

NASA has one more Venus flyby planned after this one, which is designed to sling Parker to within just 3.9 million miles (6.2 million km) of the sun. For context, Earth sits about 93 million miles (149 million km) from that shining yellow orb. So, Parker's going to get really, really close.

Related: NASA's Parker Solar Probe starts summer with 16th swoop by the sun

To delve into some technical details, Parker's recent maneuvering consisted of the craft firing its small thrusters for 4.5 seconds in order to adjust its trajectory by 77 miles (124 kilometers) and increase its speed by 1.4 seconds while heading to Venus. These shifts are actually quite minute considering the probe has been traveling at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour while flying through the inner solar system. 

During September's upcoming solar approach, for instance, the team says Parker will be moving at 394,742 mph (635,276 kph) — a new speed record for the probe and for spacecraft in general. And at its closest approach ever, it's expected that Parker will zoom through space at about 430,000 mph (700,000 kph) — a velocity NASA says would be fast enough to get you from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. in one single second.

"Parker’s velocity is about 8.7 miles per second, so in terms of changing the spacecraft’s speed and direction, this trajectory correction maneuver may seem insignificant," Yanping Guo, mission design and navigation manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, said in a statement. "However, the maneuver is critical to get us the desired gravity assist at Venus, which will significantly change Parker’s speed and distance to the sun."

Since its launch in 2018, Parker has been dubbed the probe that'll "touch the sun." And that it did. In 2021, it finally flew through our star's upper atmosphere, otherwise known as the corona, which officially meant it truly "touched the sun." 

With Parker's data, scientists hope to answer several big questions about our star, such as why the corona is so much hotter than the surface – what a weird conundrum – and decode the ins and outs of the stream of charged particles known as the solar wind. And, that's just the beginning. Eventually, perhaps it'll solve a few riddles we didn't quite know we should be pondering. 

After all, it was only recently when scientists found the sun blasting out the highest-energy radiation ever recorded, suggesting that we just may not have this star figured out yet.

NASA’s most advanced spacecraft for solar exploration just made another close flyby of the sun. 

The Parker Solar Probe conducted its 16th perihelion pass on Thursday morning (June 22), cruising through the sun’s superhot outer atmosphere, called the corona. 

As the spacecraft flies through the corona’s blazing plasma, where temperatures can climb above 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (1 million degrees Celsius), the instruments onboard the probe are kept at a comfortable 85 degrees F (29.4 degrees C). This is due to the probe’s heat shield, which is 4.5 inches (11.4 centimeters) thick and can safely reach temperatures hotter than 2,500 degrees F (1,400 degrees C).

Related: Parker Solar Probe: First spacecraft to 'touch' the sun

The Parker Solar Probe launched in August 2018 and was placed into a highly elliptical orbit around the sun. During its perihelion passes through the corona, the spacecraft can dip below 6 million miles (9.6 million kilometers) above the sun’s surface, which is known as the photosphere. 

The spacecraft is scheduled to make 24 close passes of the photosphere during its primary mission, collecting data scientists will use to improve stellar models and the ability to forecast space weather events that can pose a danger to satellites and power grids.

The photosphere has an average temperature around 10,000 degrees F (5,800 degrees C), making it hundreds of times cooler than the coronal layer above, and this is something that makes scientists scratch their heads. Simulations of the sun’s internal nuclear fusion reactions suggest that regions of the sun should increase in temperature and pressure the closer they are to the core of the star. 

The sun’s corona is difficult to study from the surface of Earth; it's outshined by the photosphere, which is the big, bright yellow ball you see in the sky when you look at the sun. (But don't look at the sun!) However, the corona is visible from Earth during total solar eclipses, which is part of the reason that solar scientists are so excited about these cosmic events.

By studying the disparities in temperature between different layers of the sun’s atmosphere, researchers hope to gain a better understanding of the process causing the star’s coronal heating, and how that affects the acceleration of the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing continuously from the sun. 

In addition to the Parker Solar Probe’s 24 planned dips through the sun’s corona, seven flybys of the planet Venus were also built into the spacecraft’s mission. These are designed to slow the probe’s velocity and calibrate its trajectory, according to NASA’s website. There are two such passes left for the spacecraft, with the next projected for Aug. 21. The Parker Solar Probe reached its 15th perihelion on March 17 of this year and will return for its 17th on Sept. 27. 

NASA's sun-touching Parker Solar probe has flown close enough to our star to spot the fine details of the solar wind — including its origin, "coronal holes" in the sun's atmosphere.

Armed with this information, scientists may now be able to better predict solar storms that can supercharge auroras over our planet but can also disrupt communication and power infrastructure and pose a threat to satellites, spacecraft and even astronauts.

The Parker Solar Probe tracked the solar wind — a stream of charged particles flowing continuously from the sun — back to where it is generated, a new study reports. This allowed researchers to see characteristics of the solar wind that are lost as it exits the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, and before it reaches Earth as a relatively uniform stream.

Related: Parker Solar Probe: First spacecraft to 'touch' the sun

The spacecraft saw that the streams of high-energy particles that make up the solar wind match so-called "supergranulation flows" within coronal holes. This discovery pointed to these regions as the source of the "fast" solar wind, which is seen over the poles of the sun and can reach speeds as great as 1.7 million mph (2.7 million kph), around 1,000 times faster than the top speed of a jet fighter. 

Coronal holes are believed to form in areas where magnetic field lines emerge from the sun's surface but do not loop back there. This causes open field lines that spread to fill the space around the sun. 

During quiet periods of our star's 11-year activity cycle, coronal holes are usually found at the poles of the sun. This means that the solar wind that emerges from coronal holes isn't usually directed toward Earth. But when the sun becomes more active and its magnetic field "flips," switching poles, coronal holes become more widespread, and these powerful streams of charged particles can be directed at our planet. That knowledge, and these new results, could aid the prediction of potentially disruptive solar storms, study team members said. 

"Winds carry lots of information from the sun to Earth, so understanding the mechanism behind the sun's wind is important for practical reasons on Earth," team co-leader and University of Maryland-College Park professor James Drake said in a statement. "That's going to affect our ability to understand how the sun releases energy and drives geomagnetic storms, which are a threat to our communication networks."

A sun shower

The coronal holes operate like a showerhead, spraying jets of charged particles from evenly spaced "bright spots" where magnetic fields extend out from the sun's surface, team members said. This gives rise to funnels that can be around 18,000 miles (29,000 kilometers) wide, seen on Earth as bright "jetlets" within coronal holes. 

The team thinks that when magnetic fields with opposite directions pass each other in these funnels, magnetic field lines break and then reconnect. It is this process, called magnetic reconnection, that is responsible for flinging out the charged particles that we see as solar wind. 

The scientists determined this because the speed of some of the observed particles is up to 10 times greater than the average for the solar wind — something only possible with a powerful phenomenon like magnetic reconnection. Such speeds aren't possible for particles simply surfing along on plasma, team members said. 

"The photosphere is covered by convection cells, like in a boiling pot of water, and the larger-scale convection flow is called supergranulation," research co-leader Stuart Bale, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in the same statement. (The photosphere is the sun's surface.)

"Where these supergranulation cells meet and go downward, they drag the magnetic field in their path into this downward kind of funnel," Bale added. "The magnetic field becomes very intensified there because it's just jammed. It's kind of a scoop of the magnetic field going down into a drain."

Bale added that it is the spatial separation of these little drains or funnels that the team saw when they looked at data gathered as the Parker Solar Probe made its close approaches to the sun.

"The big conclusion is that it's magnetic reconnection within these funnel structures that's providing the energy source of the fast solar wind," Bale said. "It doesn't just come from everywhere in a coronal hole; it's substructured within coronal holes to these supergranulation cells. It comes from these little bundles of magnetic energy that are associated with the convection flows. Our results, we think, are strong evidence that it's reconnection that's doing that."

Related: Facts about the sun's age, size and history

Getting up close and personal to find the origin of the fast solar wind

Studying the fine detail of the solar wind isn't possible from Earth because, by the time it has traveled 93 million miles (150 million km) to reach our planet and strike its magnetic field, the stream has become a homogenous flow of magnetic fields and charged particles like protons, electrons and helium nuclei. 

The Parker Solar Probe launched on Aug. 12, 2018. As of March 17, 2023, the spacecraft had made 15 close approaches to the sun, coming as close as 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) and racing past the star at speeds as great as 365,000 mph (587,000 kph). Thus, Parker gets close enough to see solar wind details before they are lost.

"Once you get below that altitude, 25 or 30 solar radii [around 11 million to 13 million miles] or so, there's a lot less evolution of the solar wind, and it's more structured  —  you see more of the imprints of what was on the sun," Bale said.

In 2021, the spacecraft passed within about 5.2 million miles (8.4 million km) of the solar surface and raced through jets of material rather than mere turbulence. The team traced those jets back to bunched-up magnetic fields and supergranulation cells on the photosphere.

What the team wasn't sure of back then, however, was if those charged particles were being accelerated by the slingshot-like action of magnetic reconnection or if they were surfing on waves of hot plasma from the sun. The high energy status of the particles told the team that the former mechanism was responsible for accelerating the charged particles, which also got a boost from turbulence in the plasma called Alfvén waves. 

"Our interpretation is that these jets of reconnection outflow excite Alfvén waves as they propagate out," Bale said. "That's an observation that's well known from Earth's magnetotail, as well, where you have similar kinds of processes."

Further data from the Parker Solar Probe, as it comes to within around 4 million miles (6.4 million km) of the sun during future close approaches, could help the team confirm their theory. But this could be complicated by the fact that the sun is about to enter solar maximum  —  a period of chaotic and intense activity. 

"There was some consternation at the beginning of the solar probe mission that we're going to launch this thing right into the quietest, most dull part of the solar cycle," Bale said. "But I think without that, we would never have understood this. It would have been just too messy. I think we're lucky that we launched it in the solar minimum."

The team's research is detailed in a paper published online today (June 7) in the journal Nature.

NASA has selected Nicola Fox as the new associate administrator for its Science Mission Directorate, who oversees more than 100 important missions and projects. 

Fox previously headed up NASA's Heliophysics Division. In her previous role, one of the missions Fox oversaw was the Parker Solar Probe, the NASA spacecraft that orbits the sun closer than any previous craft. 

"As the director of our Heliophysics Division, Nicky was instrumental in expanding the impacts and awareness of NASA's solar exploration missions, and I look forward to working with her as she brings her talents, expertise and passion to her new role," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.

Fox is just the second woman to be NASA science chief on a non-interim basis, after former astronaut Mary Cleave, who held the post from 2004 to 2007.

Related: Parker Solar Probe: First spacecraft to 'touch' the sun

Fox is now in charge of the Science Mission Directorate's $7 billion portfolio of projects. That portfolio includes more than 100 missions, which cover a wide range of scientific fields, from the investigation of how hurricanes form on Earth to the search for alien life to how best to support future astronauts living on the moon.

Fox will also be responsible for ensuring that NASA fosters an inclusive, welcoming atmosphere for a diverse team of scientists and engineers from across the U.S. and at various stages of their careers.

Fox began her own career with NASA in 2018, joining the Heliophysics Division. This led to her overseeing studies of the sun and the effect of solar wind here on Earth. Some of the missions the NASA division handles in addition to Parker include the Solar Dynamics Observatory, Solar Orbiter and the Solar Heliospheric Observatory (these last two in collaboration with the European Space Agency).

The Heliophysics Division is also in charge of the forthcoming SunRISE mission, a constellation of tiny satellites or cubesats that will act together as a radio telescope to study how solar energetic particles are accelerated and released into interplanetary space.

Before heading up the Heliophysics Division, Fox was chief scientist for heliophysics at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where she worked as project scientist for Parker.

In addition to authoring a multitude of science papers, Fox has also been the recipient of a slew of awards, including the American Astronautical Society's Carl Sagan Memorial Award for her demonstrated leadership in the field of heliophysics in 2021 and NASA's Outstanding Leadership Medal, awarded in 2020.

Fox takes over from NASA's interim science chief, Sandra Conelly, who assumed the role after Thomas Zurbuchen retired at the end of December 2022. Fox's appointment was announced by NASA on Feb. 27, 2023. 

"We're all grateful for the interim leadership of Sandra Connelly, who has done an incredible job keeping the mission moving forward over the last couple of months," Nelson said.

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NASA's sun-touching Parker Solar Probe spacecraft will celebrate St. Patrick's Day (March 17) by making another close approach to our star. While people all over Earth enjoy a cold beer, the spacecraft will brave blisteringly hot temperatures as high as 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,400 degrees Celsius) as it makes its 15th close approach to the sun, or perihelion. 

According to NASA's Parker Solar Probe website, the exact time of the close approach will be 4:30 p.m. EDT (2030 GMT) when the spacecraft comes to within around 5.3 million miles (8.5 million km) of the sun's surface, the photosphere. 

That is closer than the innermost planet to the sun, Mercury, which orbits the planet at over 6 times further away, around 34 million miles (54 million kilometers) from the sun. This close approach means Parker will come close to the sun's outer atmosphere known as the corona. 

Related: Parker Solar Probe: First spacecraft to 'touch' the sun

One of the main missions of the Parker Solar Probe, which launched on August 12, 2018, is to investigate why the corona is hundreds of times hotter than the photosphere below it.

The corona reaches temperatures in excess of 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (1 million degrees Celsius) in comparison to the average temperature of the photosphere of around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,800 degrees Celsius). Because most of the heat from the sun comes from the nuclear fusion processes at its heart, stellar models say that the interior regions should be hotter. Additionally, the plasma of the photosphere is as much as 10 million times denser than the plasma of the corona, meaning the pressures inside the star should also be greater, so it is something of a puzzle why the corona is so blisteringly hot. 

The corona is difficult to study from Earth as the light it produces is "washed out" by light from the aptly named photosphere which is only really visible when the moon covers the surface of the sun during an eclipse. At these times, the corona appears as a blazing ring of white light. 

To solve this lingering solar puzzle, the Parker Solar Probe must touch the corona and race through this wispy and nebulous plasma at speeds as high as 365,000 miles per hour (587,000 kilometers per hour). That makes the spacecraft the fastest object built by mankind, able to fly some 250 times faster than the top speed of a Lockheed Martin F-16 jet.

Braving the heat of the corona doesn't rely on the luck of the Irish though, with the Parker Solar Probe instead depending on pioneering engineering to beat the heat. Specifically, the spacecraft is equipped with a 4.5-inch-thick (11.4 centimeter) carbon-composite shield that keeps its scientific payload at room temperature even at perihelion. 

The last time the spacecraft reached perihelion was during its 14th close pass on Dec. 11, 2022, when it came to within around the same distance of the sun's surface as it will on St. Patrick's Day 2023. This isn't the closest that the Parker Solar Probe has come to the sun, however. On November 21, 2021, the spacecraft passed the sun by just a fraction closer.

Later this year, Parker will swing past Venus and adjust its trajectory with the aim of getting it even closer to the sun. The probe's planned mission includes 24 close approaches to the sun before it ends in 2025, and it will eventually come as close as 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) from the photosphere. This is closer than any other spacecraft has come to our star and is just a tenth of the distance between our star and its innermost planet Mercury.

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One of the instruments on NASA's Parker Solar Probe powered down unexpectedly last weekend, but don't panic — the mission team expects it to come back online soon.

The sun-studying spacecraft switched off its Energetic Particle Instrument-Hi (EPI-Hi) on Feb. 12, while a software patch was being uploaded to it, NASA officials explained in a brief Parker Solar Probe update on Friday (Feb. 17).

"An anomaly review board determined the instrument was turned on prematurely before the new patch was completely loaded," the update states.

"The instrument will remain off for several weeks as the geometry between the probe, the sun and solar radio frequency interference will prevent a good uplink," it continues. "The EPI-Hi is expected to return to normal operations after this blackout period, before the spacecraft begins its 15th close encounter with the sun on March 12."

The Parker Solar Probe remains healthy overall, NASA officials added in the update.

Related: What's inside the sun? A star tour from the inside out

The Parker Solar Probe launched atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket in August 2018 on a $1.5 billion mission to study the sun like never before. 

Mission scientists aim to solve several solar mysteries, chief among them why the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, is so much hotter than its surface and how the solar wind — the stream of charged particles flowing constantly from the sun — reaches its incredible velocities.

The Parker Solar Probe gathers most of its data during daring super-close flybys of the sun, which expose the spacecraft to sizzling temperatures and accelerate it to tremendous speeds. (Solar gravity is a powerful thing.)

These flybys occur roughly once every five months. The next one, the 15th of the mission to date, will peak on March 17, when the probe zooms just 5.3 million miles (8.5 million kilometers) above the sun's surface. 

As its name suggests, EPI-Hi is designed to measure high-energy solar particles. It's one of two particle detectors, along with EPI-Lo, that make up the spacecraft's Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun instrument. 

The Parker Solar Probe is equipped with three other instrument suites as well — the Fields Experiment, the Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) and the Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons investigation, or SWEAP.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

Europe's first sail solar is set to soar in orbit after taking a ride aboard a SpaceX rideshare mission earlier this month.

A shoebox-sized 6U CubeSat packing a 789-square-foot (73.3 square meters) solar sail was one of 114 satellites aboard the Transporter 6 mission which launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Jan. 3.

The Gama Alpha mission is a first demonstrator for French commercial aerospace company Gama, which says it wants to revolutionize access to deep space through low-cost, reliable and scalable solar sails. 

Related: Solar-sailing probes may soon get their moment in the sun

Solar sails use the force imparted by photons from the sun to propel a spacecraft to greater speeds, catching light from the sun in a similar way to which sails on sailboats on Earth use wind to push them forward. 

"The first phase will be commissioning the satellite, establishing communications and checking all the vital signs are good. The second phase will be the sail deployment," Jordan Culeux, Gama lead system engineer, said in a statement.

"The satellite will be put in slow rotation, initiating the release of four tungsten masses at the tip of each sail petal. The centrifugal force generated by the rotation is enough to ensure the deployment and the structural shape of the sail."

Once deployed, the mirror-like sail will collect photons to propel the spacecraft through space, allowing the Gama team to test navigation and control algorithms and collect valuable data. 

The sail will then help the spacecraft deorbit rapidly, minimizing the risk of debris and demonstrating that such a sail can be used to drag satellites into the atmosphere at the end of their operational lifetimes. 

Gama is also looking to use photonic propulsion to send spacecraft into deep space rather than just use atmospheric drag to return satellites to Earth. The firm is planning a 2025 mission to test a solar sail in medium Earth orbit, followed by a mission to Venus in 2026.

The Gama Alpha mission was supported by the French Space Agency, CNES, and a number of other public and private enterprises.

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The Parker Solar Probe is making its 14th close flyby of the sun as part of its ongoing quest to unlock the mysteries of our star.

The NASA spacecraft will pass the sun's surface, also known as the photosphere, at a distance of around 5.3 million miles (8.5 million kilometers) on Sunday (Dec. 11), braving intense radiation and extreme heat to collect data regarding the star's outer atmosphere, the corona. The exact time of the closest approach to the sun, or perihelion, will be around 8:16 a.m. EST (1316 GMT), when the spacecraft will be traveling at an incredible speed of around 364,639 mph (586,829 kph).

Amazingly, this speed, 200 times faster than a bullet fired by a rifle, isn't the record velocity for the craft. On Nov. 21, 2021, the Parker Solar Probe achieved a slightly higher speed of 364,621 mph (586,000 kph) during its 10th solar flyby, becoming the fastest spacecraft ever built, although it will break that record later in its mission.

Related: What's inside the sun? A star tour from the inside out

The Dec. 11 perihelion won't be the closest for the Parker Solar Probe, which launched aboard a Delta IV-Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral, in August 2018. During coming flybys, the spacecraft will advance on the sun, eventually passing as close as 3.8 million miles (6,115500 km) from our star's surface. Seven times closer to the sun than any previous craft and almost 10 times closer to the sun than the innermost planet, Mercury, this will see the Parker Solar Probe encounter temperatures as great as 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,400 degrees Celsius).

To withstand these extreme conditions, the spacecraft is equipped with a 4.5-inch-thick (11.43 centimeters) carbon-composite shield that keeps its scientific payload at room temperature. 

One of the Parker Solar Probe's primary objectives is to study the corona, the outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere, collecting data that could help solve one of the most long-standing mysteries regarding the sun: Why is its atmosphere hotter than its surface?

Theories of stellar physics suggest that deeper into the plasma of a star, the pressure increases and the star becomes hotter. The corona defies this wisdom, however. Despite being wispy and diffuse, the plasma in this layer is hotter than the plasma at the sun's surface, the photosphere that lies beneath the corona. Temperatures at the corona spike to 2 million F (1.1 million C) and higher, despite the fact that 1,000 miles (1,600 km) below it, the photosphere is 10 million times denser and reaches temperatures of just 10,000 F (5,500 C).

The corona is difficult to study from Earth because the light it emits is washed out by the much brighter light from the photosphere, meaning the corona is only visible during a total solar eclipse, when the moon blocks light from the photosphere. (Scientists can also use special tools to replicate the effect.)

Hence the need for the Parker Solar Probe to get "up close and personal" with our star in order to better understand the corona, which is also responsible for launching the solar wind, a stream of charged particles that can interfere with communication and power infrastructure here on Earth.

Because the sun is the only star close enough to study in this way, learning more about it will also help scientists understand stellar bodies much further afield. 

The Parker Solar Probe will make its next and 15th close approach to the sun on March 17, 2023, also reaching around 5.3 million miles (8.5 million km) above the sun's surface. Later in the year, the spacecraft will swing past Venus to adjust its trajectory closer to the sun as the mission approaches its conclusion in 2025.

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China's recently launched Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory (ASO-S) has returned its first image, showing an M-class flare erupting on the sun.

The sun image was produced by the spacecraft's Hard X-ray Imager (HXI) and released by the Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

HXI captured the eruption of a medium class solar flare on Nov. 11, just weeks after ASO-S was launched. The event saw a tremendous explosion of electromagnetic radiation from the sun's atmosphere. These and larger solar flares can affect the ionosphere and radio communications on Earth.

Related: What is space weather, and how is it predicted?

ASO-S, nicknamed Kuafu-1, launched on Oct. 8 into a sun-synchronous orbit about 450 miles (720 kilometers) above Earth, from which it will monitor the sun's magnetic field and observe solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which hurl vast quantities of superheated plasma into space.

The probe aims to further our understanding of how these violent events are generated and improve space weather predictions.

HXI and ASO-S's two other science instruments have been tested and calibrated, and the probe has already started its operational science phase.

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The European sun-observing mission Solar Orbiter observed a mysterious "switchback" in the solar wind that might explain what propels particles from the sun across the solar system. 

The probe, built to take the closest images of the sun and study the star's magnetic field, spotted the weird S-shaped "kink" in the solar plasma in March this year, and the observation was published on Monday (Sept. 12). Described in a new paper as "the first evidence of a switchback in the solar corona," the observation was made by Solar Orbiter's coronagraph METIS (an instrument that blocks out the disk of the sun to observe the surrounding upper atmosphere, the corona). 

Such switchbacks have previously been hypothesized, as other spacecraft including NASA's Parker Solar Probe have detected sudden reversals in the magnetic field in the sun's vicinity. These switchbacks have never before been observed directly however, as the spacecraft detecting them were not equipped with cameras. 

Related: 2nd huge eruption from the sun hammers Venus

NASA's Parker Solar Probe, for example, periodically dives to within only a few million miles of the sun's surface. But the temperature in this area is so hot that no existing camera technologies could survive the dive. Solar Orbiter, which approaches the star more cautiously, coming only as close as one third of the sun-Earth distance, is equipped with both types of sun-observing sensors — direct imaging instruments as well as those that measure the properties of the surrounding environment. 

By comparing images taken by Solar Orbiter's instruments at various wavelengths of light, scientists realized the strange phenomenon took place just above an active sunspot, a cooler region on the sun's surface where the star's magnetic field is twisted and dense.

"I would say that this first image of a magnetic switchback in the solar corona has revealed the mystery of their origin," Daniele Telloni, a solar physicist at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Torino, Italy, said in a statement. 

Telloni was the one who first spotted the structure in the data captured by METIS on March 25, only a few days before Solar Orbiter's closest approach to the sun to date. 

The observation seemed to match mathematical models of switchback triggering developed previously by Gary Zank, a space physicist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

"The first image from METIS that Daniele [Telloni] showed suggested to me almost immediately the cartoons that we had drawn in developing the mathematical model for a switchback," Zank said in the statement. 

According to Zank's modeling, switchbacks can occur above sunspots when some of the distorted magnetic lines break and connect with magnetic lines that are open and connected with the interplanetary magnetic field in the solar system. 

"Rather like cracking a whip, this releases energy and sets an S-shaped disturbance traveling off into space, which a passing spacecraft would record as a switchback," the scientists said in the statement.

These switchbacks, scientists believe, may play a role in the acceleration and heating of the solar wind, the stream of particles emanating from the sun. This acceleration can be observed quite far away from the sun, and so far, scientists have no explanation for it. 

The study was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on Monday (Sept. 12).

Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

NASA's Parker Solar Probe has just zipped past the sun, and scientists are extraordinarily excited.

Parker Solar Probe came within 5.3 million miles (8.5 million kilometers) of the sun's surface Tuesday (Sept. 6) at 2:04 a.m. EDT (0604 GMT) in its 13th close approach of the sun, or perihelion. And this perihelion comes when the sun has been remarkably active, sporting a sunspot the size of Earth and having recently ejected solar flares and geomagnetic storms. Parker hasn't yet encountered such activity during its close encounters with the sun, but scientists hope that this time around, the spacecraft might catch an outburst.

"Nobody has ever flown through a solar event so close to the sun before," Parker Solar Probe project scientist Nour Raouafi of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), which manages the mission, said in a statement. "The data would be totally new, and we would definitely learn a lot from it."

Related: Trio of solar flares produce radio blackouts and dazzling auroras

When Parker launched in 2018, the sun was in solar minimum, a quiet period in the 11-year solar cycle. But activity is currently ramping back up to solar maximum, which is anticipated to occur in 2025, and the sun is already more active than scientists predicted. Fortunately, Parker has 11 perhelia left in its mission even after the current maneuver, so scientists hope some will coincide with future solar events as their frequency increases.

"While the sun was quiet, we did three years of great science," Raouafi said. "But our view of the solar wind and the corona will be totally different now, and we're very curious to see what we'll learn next." The corona is the sun's outer atmosphere and the primary target of Parker's observations.

Another factor makes this perihelion special: There will be a second set of eyes on the sun to provide even more data to scientists. Solar Orbiter, a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), will observe the sun at the same time as Parker, but from 58.5 million miles (94.1 million kilometers) away after Solar Orbiter made a flyby of Venus on Saturday (Sept. 3).

"By combining the data from multiple space missions and even ground observatories, we can understand the bigger picture," Raouafi said. "In this case, with both Parker and Solar Orbiter observing the sun from different distances, we will be able to study the evolution of the solar wind, gathering data as it passes one spacecraft and then the other."

Follow Stefanie Waldek on Twitter @StefanieWaldek. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

The European Space Agency will ask its member states to fund a preparatory space-based solar power program at a major meeting later this year.

The Solaris program would explore the potential of space-based solar power (SBSP) generation to provide clean energy and contribute to decarbonization by working with European industry to assess technical feasibility, benefits, implementation options, commercial opportunities and risks of the emerging technology. 

SBSP involves collecting solar energy with huge solar arrays in geostationary orbit, an orbit at the altitude of 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) where satellites appear suspended above a fixed spot on Earth. Without the obstruction by Earth's atmosphere, space-based solar power plants would generate energy more efficiently than Earth-based plants, and beam it to the ground for conversion into electricity.

Related: A solar power plant in space? The UK wants to build one by 2035.

ESA describes the Solaris program as a response to the current climate change crisis on Earth and a potential source of clean, affordable, continuous, abundant and secure energy. A decision on moving ahead with a European SBSP development program would be made by 2025, the agency said in a statement.

"Space-based solar power would be an important step towards carbon neutrality and energy independence for Europe," ESA's director general Josef Aschbacher tweeted on Aug. 16. "Two recent independent studies strongly recommend investments to advance the SBSP technologies needed to address our growing energy crisis."

The two cost versus benefit studies on "Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP) for terrestrial energy needs" were completed earlier this month.

"We have the main building blocks already, but let me be clear: for the project to succeed, much technology development and funding is still needed," Aschbacher wrote.

The Solaris proposal will be put forward at the ESA Council of Ministers in November, but how much funding is being sought is not known. The ultimate goal of SBSP would be to aid Europe's transition to a net zero carbon world by 2050. 

The concept of SBSP first emerged in the 1960s but has recently become of great interest to a number of countries. The U.K. expressed its interest in an SBSP system earlier this year, while China is planning in-orbit tests before the end of the decade as a stepping stone to a gigawatt-level system by mid-century. 

In the U.S., NASA is also interested in studying SBSP while a billionaire-backed project at Caltech in Pasadena is already working on hardware for harvesting solar energy collected in space.

While promising a source of clean, continuous energy, space-based solar power faces major challenges in the shape of technological, economic, policy and other hurdles.

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NASA's sun-grazing spacecraft will make its 12th close flyby of our star on Wednesday (June 1), marking the halfway point of the mission.

During this flyby, the Parker Solar Probe, which is specially designed to take the extreme solar heat and radiation, will get as close as 5.3 million miles (8.5 million kilometers) of the solar surface, which is about as near as it drew during the last close approach on Feb. 25.

Flying 14 times closer than the orbit of Mercury — our solar system's closest planet to the sun — Parker will reach a top speed of 364,660 mph (586,860 kph). That's roughly 21 times faster than the International Space Station's speed as it orbits Earth. The exact time of the closest approach, known as perihelion, will be 6:50 p.m. EDT (2250 GMT), according to a spokesperson at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), which oversees the mission. 

Related: What's inside the sun? A star tour from the inside out

Parker isn't set to break its speed record again this time, as it has several times throughout its mission. But what's more valuable that superlatives is how so many close passes are providing information about the sun's complex behavior, which leads to phenomena such as superheating the million-degree corona that is much hotter than the plasma on the sun's surface.

"The Parker Solar Probe mission is not only reshaping the landscape of solar and heliophysics research before our eyes, but it is enticing us to pursue challenging ideas that, just a few years ago, we considered out of reach," Nour Raouafi, the mission's project scientist from JHUAPL, said in a recent statement.

The mission has crossed the Alfvén critical surface now numerous times, for example. That's where solar material leaves the surface and becomes the solar wind, a critical radiation vector that affects space weather all over the solar system. Scientists now know that the boundary is wrinkled, rather than a smooth curve.

"Sampling the solar wind below the Alfvén critical boundary is essential to understanding the heating and acceleration of the solar wind," stated BWX Technologies' Justin Kasper, principal investigator for Parker's Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons (SWEAP) instrument. 

Some of Parker's other discoveries include finding a dust-free area around the sun where the grains sublimate due to extreme heat, determining the origin of magnetic field "switchbacks" (or field flips) at magnetic "funnels" in the solar surface, and better understanding the nature of solar energetic particles.

The mission is expected to better uncover the nature of space weather, which can affect our planet by shorting out satellites, power lines or other infrastructure during the most powerful storms. More usually, however, the events are harmless and produce colorful displays high in up in our atmosphere called auroras.

Parker Solar Probe launched in August 2018 and includes four different instrument suites. It also does periodic planetary flybys of Venus to pick up speed or adjust course, sometimes nabbing stunning images along the way. The next such flyby will occur in August 2023.

All told, the Parker Solar Probe is expected to make 24 close passes of the sun during its seven-year mission, which is scheduled to wrap up in mid-2025.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe launched on Aug. 12, 2018, aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket. The Parker Solar Probe's mission is to study the sun in unprecedented detail.

The revolutionary solar probe became the first spacecraft to "touch" the sun when it swooped inside the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, during its eighth flyby on April 28, 2021, according to a statement from NASA. The probe will complete 24 orbits of the sun over its seven-year lifespan and fly seven times closer to our star than any other spacecraft.

The Parker Solar Probe's closest approach to the sun will occur on Dec. 24, 2024, during which the spacecraft will swoop to within 3.8 million miles of the solar surface.

The Parker Solar Probe is named after pioneering astrophysicist Eugene Parker, who first proposed the existence of solar wind in 1958, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). Parker visited the probe during its construction and witnessed its launch, in doing so becoming the first person to ever witness the liftoff of their namesake spacecraft. Prof. Emeritus Eugene N. Parker died on March 15, 2022, at the age of 94.

"Parker Solar Probe is going to answer questions about solar physics that we've puzzled over for more than six decades," Parker Solar Probe Project Scientist Nicola Fox, of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), said in a statement.

"It's a spacecraft loaded with technological breakthroughs that will solve many of the largest mysteries about our star, including finding out why the sun's corona is so much hotter than its surface. And we're very proud to be able to carry Gene's name with us on this amazing voyage of discovery."

Related: How hot is the sun?

Parker Solar Probe speed

On Sept. 27, 2023, the sun's powerful gravity accelerated the probe to a top speed blistering 394,736 mph/ (635,266 km/h)That's faster than any probe had ever traveled before.

Parker Solar Probe trajectory

The Parker Solar Probe has flown closer to the sun than any other spacecraft and will continue to shrink its orbit around our star over its approximately seven-year lifespan.

The solar probe's swooping trajectory around the sun would not be possible without a series of Venus gravity assist flybys. Over its lifetime, the probe will use seven Venus flybys to gradually narrow its orbit around the sun, coming as close as 3.83 million miles (6.16 million km) — more than seven times closer than Mercury gets to our star, according to the APL.

Parker Solar Probe temperature

When the probe makes its closest approach to the sun, its solar shields will encounter temperatures approaching 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit (1,400 degrees Celsius), according to APL.

Astonishingly, the spacecraft's science instruments will be protected from these scorching temperatures and remain close to room temperature — about 85 degrees F (30 degrees C).

Parker Solar Probe objectives

The Parker Solar Probe is studying the sun up close and personal in a bid to understand how energy and heat move through the sun's atmosphere and affect processes such as the solar wind.

According to APL, the three main scientific objectives of the Parker Solar Probe are:

1. Trace the flow of energy that heats and accelerates the solar corona and solar wind.
2. Determine the structure and dynamics of the plasma and magnetic fields at the sources of the solar wind.
3. Explore mechanisms that accelerate and transport energetic particles.

The sun is the primary source of Earth's light and heat, but that's not the only way it affects the planet. The solar wind is a collection of charged particles that stream from the star and flow past Earth at speeds of more than a million mph (400 kilometers per second), according to NASA. Disturbances in the solar wind can shake our planet's magnetic field and pump energy into the radiation belts, triggering a set of changes known as space weather.

Space weather is significantly affected by the solar wind and other solar outbursts such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections. During times of peak activity — when the solar cycle is at solar maximum — space weather can pose a risk to communications on Earth, satellites and even spacewalking astronauts.

The Parker Solar Probe is helping scientists understand more about the sun's underlying mechanisms so they can improve space forecasting efforts and be more prepared for changes in solar activity.

"Until we can explain what is going on up close to the sun, we will not be able to accurately predict space weather effects that can cause havoc at Earth," says the APL Parker Solar Probe website.

Parker solar probe instruments

The spacecraft carries four instruments:

The Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons Investigation (SWEAP) counts the most abundant particles in the solar wind, measuring the properties of electrons, protons and helium ions.

The Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe Plus (WISPR) is a telescope that makes three-dimensional images of the sun's corona and inner heliosphere to actually "see" the solar wind and provide 3D images of shocks and other structures as they travel past the spacecraft. When flying past Venus in 2020, the WISPR instrument detected a bright rim surrounding the planet. Scientists suggest it may be a phenomenon known as nightglow caused by "light emitted by oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere that recombine into molecules in the nightside" NASA officials said in a description of the image.

The Electromagnetic Fields Investigation (FIELDS) makes direct measurements of the shock waves that course through the sun's atmospheric plasma.

The Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun (IS◉IS) consists of two instruments that will take an inventory of the elements in the solar atmosphere by using a mass spectrometer to study charged particles near the probe.

Eugene Newman Parker legacy

In the 1950s, Eugene Newman Parker, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, proposed several concepts about how stars — including our sun — give off energy. He described an entire complex system of plasmas, magnetic fields and magnetic particles that make up what he referred to as the solar wind, the cascade of energy streaming from the sun.

Originally, the mission was billed as Solar Probe Plus. But in 2017, only a few days before the scientist's 90th birthday, NASA renamed the mission to honor Parker for his contributions.

"This is the first time NASA has named a spacecraft for a living individual," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a statement. "It's a testament to the importance of his body of work, founding a new field of science that also inspired my research and many important science questions NASA continues to study and further understand every day. I'm very excited to be personally involved honoring a great man and his unprecedented legacy."

Most NASA missions are renamed after their launch and certification. However, in this case, the decision was made to honor Parker before the launch, to draw attention to his important contributions to heliophysics and space science.

Originally proposed in 1958, the mission has been a long time in coming, "not because we weren't excited," Fox told reporters before the 2018 launch, "but because we had to wait 60 years for technology to catch up with our dreams."

"The solar probe is going to a region of space that has never been explored before," said Parker. "It's very exciting that we'll finally get a look. One would like to have some more detailed measurements of what's going on in the solar wind. I'm sure that there will be some surprises. There always are."

On Aug. 12, 2018, Parker became the first person to ever witness the launch of their namesake spacecraft. In addition, Parker received numerous awards for his research and significant contributions to science, including the George Ellery Hale Prize, the National Medal of Science, the Bruce Medal, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Kyoto Prize, the James Clerk Maxwell Prize and the Crafoord Prize in Astronomy, according to his NASA biography.

Pioneering astrophysicist Prof. Emeritus Eugene N. Parker died on March 15, 2022, aged 94, according to a statement released by the University of Chicago.

"The university and the department has lost one of its giants," said Michael Turner, the Bruce V. and Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago and a colleague of Parker's for decades. "Gene changed the course of science with his work on magnetic fields literally everywhere in the cosmos, but he remained humble and approachable, with a wry sense of humor."

Additional resources

Learn more about the Parker Solar Probe mission with this NASA press kit. Explore the solar probe's instruments with a series of short videos from APL. Read what NASA scientist Kelly Korreck has to say about what it takes to be a solar scientist. Check out ESA's Solar Orbiter and learn more about its solar orbiting mission with these resources from ESA.

Bibliography

Johnson-Groh, M. (2021, December 13). NASA enters the solar atmosphere for the first time. NASA. Retrieved May 5, 2022.

Teamwork with Parker Solar Probe. ESA. (2019, October 7). Retrieved May 5, 2022.

Brown, G. (2017, May 31). Solar Probe Mission renamed to honor pioneering physicist. NASA. Retrieved May 5, 2022.

NASA. (2021, December 14). In-depth: Parker Solar Probe. NASA. Retrieved May 5, 2022.

NASA Parker Solar Probe: The Mission. The John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Retrieved May 5, 2022.

Buckley, M. (2021, February 24). Parker Solar Probe offers stunning view of Venus. NASA. Retrieved May 5, 2022.

Garner, R. (2021, February 8). Eugene Newman Parker. NASA. Retrieved May 5, 2022, from A NASA biography article.

Eugene Parker, the pioneering astrophysicist whose name graces NASA's Parker Solar Probe mission, died Tuesday (March 15) at age 94.

Parker's work focused on understanding the sun. In a key contribution to the field, he proposed that the sun produces a phenomenon called solar wind, a steady stream of charged particles that flows off the sun and across the solar system. The mission named for him seeks to understand the origins of the solar wind within the sun. Both NASA and the University of Chicago, where Parker had worked for decades, announced his death.

"We were saddened to learn the news that one of the great scientific minds and leaders of our time has passed," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in an agency statement. 

"Dr. Eugene Parker's contributions to science and to understanding how our universe works touches so much of what we do here at NASA," he added. "Dr. Parker's legacy will live on, through the many active and future NASA missions that build upon his work."

Related: What's inside the sun? A star tour from the inside out

NASA's Parker Solar Probe launched in August 2018 to study the sun's outer atmosphere, called the corona, by diving within 4 million miles (6.5 million kilometers) of the visible surface of the sun. The spacecraft uses four instrument suites to study the superheated corona in an attempt to understand where the solar wind originates. The mission is expected to continue observations until 2025.

The mission, originally dubbed Solar Probe+, was named for Parker in 2017, making him the first living scientist to see a spacecraft named in his honor. Parker himself attended the launch, his first ever.

"Anyone who knew Dr. Parker, knew that he was a visionary," Nicola Fox, director of NASA's heliophysics division, said in the agency statement. "I was honored to stand with him at the launch of Parker Solar Probe and have loved getting to share with him all the exciting science results, seeing his face light up with every new image and data plot I showed him. I will sincerely miss his excitement and love for Parker Solar Probe. Even though Dr. Parker is no longer with us, his discoveries and legacy will live forever."

Parker was born in 1927 in Houghton, Michigan, and completed an undergraduate degree in physics from Michigan State University in 1948 and a Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 1951. He first worked as an instructor and assistant professor at the University of Utah. 

In 1955, Parker joined the University of Chicago, where he contributed to astrophysics for another 67 years, according to the university's statement. Two years after his appointment, he realized the superheated corona of the sun should, in theory, create charged particles leaving the sun's surface at high speed. 

Other scientists didn't believe him, Parker recalled in 2018. "The first reviewer on the paper said, 'Well I would suggest that Parker go to the library and read up on the subject before he tries to write a paper about it, because this is utter nonsense.'"

Support at last came from a colleague of Parker's at the university, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar — who himself, decades later became the namesake of NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. 

While the future Nobel Prize winner wasn't a fan of the particle idea, Chandrasekhar accepted Parker's paper because he could not find problems with Parker's mathematics, the University of Chicago said.

It only took a few more years before Parker's proof came through. In 1962, NASA's Mariner 2 spacecraft (the agency's first interplanetary mission) discovered the solar wind during its voyage to Venus. 

In the following decades, Parker expanded his research to examine cosmic rays, galactic magnetic fields, and other topics in astrophysics. As a result of his broad interests, a range of scientific concepts are named for him.

"His name is littered across astrophysics: the Parker instability, which describes magnetic fields in galaxies; the Parker equation, which describes particles moving through plasmas; the Sweet-Parker model of magnetic fields in plasmas; and the Parker limit on the flux of magnetic monopoles," the university wrote of Parker.

Parker was also chair twice over for both the university's astronomy and astrophysics department, as well as the astronomy section of the National Academy of Sciences. He retired in 1995, but remained active in the field of astrophysics until shortly before his death.

"Gene represented to me the ideal physicist — brilliant and accomplished, personable, articulate, but also humble," Robert Rosner, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago and a longtime colleague of Parker's, said in the university statement.

"I will never forget the pleasure he took in exploring a science problem, and his terrific physical insights which were then buttressed by his analytical skills," Rosner added. "And one can never forget the encouragement he gave to everyone he interacted with — his own students and postdocs, and his colleagues. His passing indeed marks a great loss for us all."

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Telescopes on Earth and in space had the sun safely in their sights when NASA's Parker Solar Probe made its 11th daring close flyby of the star on Feb. 25, all to understand more about the sun's behavior.

To be clear, the Parker Solar Probe wasn't directly visible in the various instruments, as the van-sized spacecraft was too small for the telescopes to pick out. But what the long-distance view did provide is valuable context for what the spacecraft saw close up, from as close as 5.3 million miles (8.5 million kilometers) from the sun's surface, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) said in a statement.

The list of 40 observatories is literally globe-spanning, including the recently commissioned Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, and other major telescopes in the United States, Europe and Asia. 

Additionally, a dozen spacecraft provided viewpoints from around the solar system. NASA tasked its Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), Solar Dynamics Observatory, Thermosphere Ionosphere. Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) and Magnetospheric Multiscale missions. 

Other contributions came from NASA's and the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter, ESA's BepiColombo at Mercury, the Japanese-led Hinode solar observatory, and NASA's Mars Atmospheric and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) at Mars.

Related: What's inside the sun? A star tour from the inside out

JHUAPL said it will take several weeks at the least to receive preliminary data, meaning that the analysis will take several more months or longer. "The team will get a glimpse of some readings when [Parker] sends a limited amount of data this week," the laboratory noted of its own mission.

Parker is trying to understand the mechanisms behind space weather, or the behavior from our sun in the form of events such as charged particle eruptions. Occasionally these eruptions can disrupt infrastructure such as power lines or satellites, or create colorful displays high in the atmosphere called auroras.

Scientists are also eager to see Parker's viewpoint when it recorded a large solar prominence on Feb. 15 that safely smacked the spacecraft, marking the largest such event the spacecraft experienced since it launched 3.5 years ago.

"The shock from the event hit Parker Solar Probe head-on, but the spacecraft was built to withstand activity just like this — to get data in the most extreme conditions," project scientist Nour Raouafi said in a statement. Pointing to the sun's 11-year-cycle starting to ramp up, Raouafi added the team "can't wait to see the data that Parker Solar Probe gathers as it gets closer and closer."

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The Parker Solar Probe is ready to make its 11th close flyby of the sun during its quest to understand how our neighboring star works.

The plucky spacecraft, heavily shielded against the sun's radiation and extreme heat, will dip to within 5.3 million miles (8.5 million kilometers) of the solar surface on Friday (Feb. 25). That's about 14 times closer than the orbit of Mercury, our closest planet to the sun.

The exact time of the closest approach, known as perihelion, will be 10:36 a.m. EST (1536 GMT), according to a spokesperson at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which oversees the mission. 

Related: What's inside the sun? A star tour from the inside out

At closest approach, the spacecraft will be flying at about 364,660 mph (586,860 kilometers kph); Parker Solar Probe has held the speed record for fastest spacecraft since 2018, a couple of months after its launch.

By the end of its mission, the spacecraft will be send home data from within just 3.83 million miles (6.16 million km) of the sun's surface. Getting that close to the sun will allow scientists to continue making observations about the solar environment, particularly the atmosphere, which scientists call the corona. The incredibly hot corona is millions of degrees hotter than the surface, regardless of the scale of temperature used, and it's not quite clear yet how this huge jump in temperatures happens.

Parker Solar Probe launched in August 2018 to study the sun's outer atmosphere and includes four different instrument suites to learn more about how the corona works, and how it affects space weather near our planet.

Space weather can affect our planet in numerous ways, especially when coronal mass ejections of charged particles from our sun hit infrastructure such as power lines or satellites. These events, however, also can produce colorful displays high in up in our atmosphere called auroras.

While doing solar science, Parker is also performing flybys of other planets to pick up speed and to do some side science observations. An example includes visible-light pictures of Venus that the probe captured, released earlier in February. Over the mission, the probe will make a total of seven Venus flybys to use the planet's gravity to adjust course; the next such flyby will occur in August 2023.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

In between its main mission, the Parker Solar Probe just made a novel contribution to Venusian science.

New images from the sun-focused mission, captured during a close flyby of Venus, show the planet in visible light for the first time. With time and analysis, the new images will provide valuable information about the planet's geology and minerals, NASA said.

"By combining the new images with previous ones, scientists now have a wider range of wavelengths to study, which can help identify what minerals are on the surface of the planet," the agency said in a statement Wednesday (Feb. 9).

"Such techniques have previously been used to study the surface of the moon," NASA continued. "Future missions will continue to expand this range of wavelengths, which will contribute to our understanding of habitable planets."

Related: What's inside the sun? A star tour from the inside out

The Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR) imaged the entire night side of the planet in visible light as well as infrared light, revealing regions including continents, plains and plateaus on the lava-soaked planet. Additionally, scientists spotted oxygen in Venus' atmosphere forming a halo around the planet.

Seeing the surface in visible light is no small feat, given that Venus is permanently shrouded by clouds. But it's not the first time WISPR took images of the planet, as it did so previously during a July 2020 flyby of Venus (the mission's third flyby).

WISPR is designed to look at faint features on the sun and to pick up subtleties in the constant stream of particles flowing from the sun — known as the solar wind. It turns out these capabilities work well on Venus, not only showing its cloud tops but even peeking through to the surface, NASA said.

"Clouds obstruct most of the visible light coming from Venus' surface, but the very longest visible wavelengths, which border the near-infrared wavelengths, make it through," the agency explained. While the red light mostly gets lost in daylight pictures, the hope was that a nighttime pass would allow WISPR to see the heat of Venus glowing from the surface.

That chance came with a February 2021 flyby, the mission's fourth flyby of Venus, when the spacecraft passed by the planet's nightside for the first time.

"The surface of Venus, even on the nightside, is about 860 degrees Fahrenheit [460 degrees Celsius]," lead author Brian Wood, a physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, said in the NASA statement. "It's so hot that the rocky surface of Venus is visibly glowing, like a piece of iron pulled from a forge."

WISPR picked up wavelengths ranging from the near-infrared (which was visible as heat) to the visible, between 470 nanometers and 800 nanometers. This work is distinctive from previous orbiting missions, which relied upon radar and infrared observations to look at the surface of the planet.

Notable past mapping efforts including the Soviet Venera 9 landing mission of 1975, NASA's Magellan mission that gathered the first planetary maps from orbit in the 1990s using radar wavelengths, and Japan's Akatsuki infrared images since reaching orbit around Venus in 2016.

WISPR's new images of areas such as the continental region Aphrodite Terra, the Tellus Regio plateau, and the Aino Planitia plains can be compared with these other mission images to gain more insights into the planet's history, NASA stated. Since Earth and Venus are both rocky planets, such studies may also help inform our understanding of rocky planet evolution more generally.

A study based on the research was published in Geophysical Research Letters on Feb. 9.

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A new video of solar streamers evokes the streaking stars seen during spacecraft hyperdrives in "Star Wars."

The new NASA video from the Parker Solar Probe shows these mysterious sun structures up close for the first time, flowing past the spacecraft like interstellar fireflies. Previously, we could only catch a glimpse of streamers during solar eclipses.

But with Parker specially shielded for heat-searing passes by the sun, the spacecraft has been making daring approaches closer and closer to our starry neighbor, finally reaching inside the corona during an April flyby.

The detailed data from that pass-through, released last month, showed a bunch of streamers, said the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in a statement on YouTube with the video. 

"These structures can be seen as bright features moving upward and downward in this video compiled from the spacecraft's WISPR [Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe] instrument," the laboratory said. WISPR is designed to study the density of charged particles like electrons, as well as the coronal structure.

Related: What's inside the sun? A star tour from the inside out

Parker is on a larger quest to better understand solar physics, and especially how the solar wind is generated. The solar wind is a set of charged particles constantly streaming from the sun throughout the solar system; at Earth, they influence everything from auroral activity to radiation risks for satellites and astronauts.

In April, the spacecraft passed as low as 15 solar radii from the visible surface of the sun, called the photosphere, during which it spotted a "pseudostreamer," one of the huge structures you can see from Earth during total solar eclipses.

"Passing through the pseudostreamer was like flying into the eye of a storm," NASA said in a statement, noting that in that zone, Parker experienced quieter conditions and fewer particles compared with other flybys.

Parker's next close flyby is expected later this month.

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The Parker Solar Probe has finally reached the atmosphere of the sun.

The NASA spacecraft spent more than three years winding its way by planets and creeping gradually closer to our star to learn more about the origin of the solar wind, which pushes charged particles across the solar system.

Since solar activity has a large effect on living on Earth, from generating auroras to threatening infrastructure like satellites, scientists want to know more about how the sun operates to better make predictions about space weather.

Related: What's inside the sun? A star tour from the inside out

Observations from Parker's April 28 flyby, which was the eighth time the spacecraft whizzed by the sun, show that the spacecraft managed to get inside the sun's atmosphere, or the corona, for the first time. The results generated two science papers that NASA explored in a recent statement.

"We were fully expecting that, sooner or later, we would encounter the corona for at least a short duration of time," Justin Kasper, lead author on a new paper about the coronal milestone published in Physical Review Letters, said in the statement. Kasper is also deputy chief technology officer at BWX Technologies and a University of Michigan professor.

The sun isn't a solid sphere like our Earth, but it does have a zone in which the immense gravity of the star keeps in the solar material it spews through fusion. 

At a particular distance from the sun, however, gravity and magnetic fields are no longer able to keep that material close. It's from that point where the solar wind flows away from the sun, never to return. The point of no return is called the Alfvén critical surface and scientists had not been able to measure exactly where it was, before Parker reached it.

Previously, faraway pictures of the corona suggested that the critical surface was somewhere between 4.3 to 8.6 million miles (6.9 to 13.8 million kilometers) from the surface of the sun, or in relative terms, the equivalent of 10 to 20 times the radius of the sun. As it turns out, these estimates were not too far off. Parker's data suggests it crossed the critical surface at 18.8 solar radii, or 8.1 million miles (13 million km) above the sun's surface.

More importantly, Parker found the critical surface is not uniform, and there are "spikes and valleys" (as NASA termed it) in which the surface protrudes higher or lower from the center of the sun. The surface also likely varies with solar wind activity, which in turn depends on the sun's 11-year solar cycle.

"Discovering where these protrusions line up with solar activity coming from the surface can help scientists learn how events on the sun affect the atmosphere and solar wind," NASA officials wrote in the statement.

Parker could only spend a few hours in the corona due to the intense conditions there, but it did manage to go as low as 15 solar radii from the sun's surface. In that zone, it found a "pseudostreamer," one of the huge structures you can see from Earth during total solar eclipses.

"Passing through the pseudostreamer was like flying into the eye of a storm," NASA said in the same statement, noting that Parker saw changes such as quieter conditions and fewer particles. 

On future flybys, Parker is expected to creep even closer to the sun, coming as low as 8.86 solar radii (3.83 million miles or 6.16 million km) from the sun's photosphere, its visible surface.

Farther away from the sun, the spacecraft has been exploring the physics of "switchbacks," or zig-zag-shaped structures in the solar wind.

Parker's work on this aspect of solar physics, now in press at the Astrophysical Journal, suggests that switchbacks originate at the visible surface of the sun, known as the photosphere. The switchbacks have been known for some time and were first discovered by the NASA-European Space Agency mission Ulysses, which orbited the sun's poles in the 1990s.

While scientists at first assumed the switchbacks were confined to solar regions, Parker found the switchbacks were quite common in the solar wind in 2019. Now fresh findings, from the mission's sixth solar flyby, suggest that switchbacks "occur in patches and have a higher percentage of helium" than other elements, NASA said.

Scientists also found that the patches line up with magnetic funnels coming from the photosphere, called supergranules. This is helpful to understanding solar physics because the funnels may be where fast particles of the solar wind originate.

"The structure of the regions with switchbacks matches up with a small magnetic funnel structure at the base of the corona," Stuart Bale, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author on the new switchbacks paper, said in the NASA statement. "This is what we expect from some theories, and this pinpoints a source for the solar wind itself."

If scientists could better understand the physics of switchbacks, this may also point to why the corona is millions of degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius, which is far above the temperature of the solar surface.

"While the new findings locate where switchbacks are made, the scientists can't yet confirm how they're formed," NASA added. "One theory suggests they might be created by waves of plasma that roll through the region like ocean surf. Another contends they're made by an explosive process known as magnetic reconnection, which is thought to occur at the boundaries where the magnetic funnels come together."

Parker Solar Probe's next solar flyby is scheduled for late February 2022, although the spacecraft will gather observations for weeks before and after the closest approach.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

A NASA sun-gazing spacecraft broke its own speed and distance records Sunday (Nov. 21) as it moved closer to our star.

The Parker Solar Probe reached a top speed of 101 miles (163 kilometers) per second during its 10th close solar flyby on Sunday, which translates to a dizzying 364,621 mph (586,000 kph), NASA officials said.

The high speed comes as Parker braves the heat to get closer to the sun, on a quest to better understand how our star generates "space weather" that affects everything from satellite operations to astronaut safety to auroras. And Parker just set a closest-distance record, too, getting a mere 5.3 million miles (8.5 million km) from the sun's surface, which is known as the photosphere. 

NASA didn't publish exactly what records Parker just beat, but a glance at the last close flyby shows us the most likely numbers. On Aug. 9, Parker was roughly 6.5 million miles (10.4 million km) away from the sun's surface and hit a top speed of about 330,000 mph (532,000 kph).

Getting so close to the sun exposes Parker to extreme temperatures, which engineers prepared for with a unique heat shield (involving reflective paint, a carbon-foam core and panels of carbon-carbon composite) affectionately dubbed a "giant Frisbee".

Engineers are getting surprised by the amount of dust near the sun, however. That said, the spacecraft is robust in dealing with dust, even if modeling work performed before launch didn't account for the amount the probe is seeing, NASA officials said in a statement.

"We designed materials and components that survive hypervelocity dust impacts and the effects of the even smaller particles created in these impacts," Jim Kinnison, Parker Solar Probe mission systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, in the statement. 

"We modeled the makeup and effects of the dust environment," Kinnison added, "tested how materials react to the dust particles, and installed fault-tolerant onboard systems that are keeping Parker Solar Probe safe in this unexplored region."

The mission team expects to keep breaking speed and distance records, especially after Parker finishes two Venus flybys in August 2023 and November 2024 to pick up more speed. By December 2024, Parker should get as close as 4 million miles (6.2 million kilometers) to the solar surface, with speeds of more than 430,000 mph (690,000 kph.)

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