Parker Probe touches the sun for the first time

 

According to NASA Press Services, for the first time in the history of astronautics, the Parker probe touched the sun.
The US spacecraft Parker Solar Probe has reached the sun.

The spacecraft flew through the star’s upper atmosphere and sampled particles and magnetic fields.

NASA noted that this is a new milestone and a giant leap in solar energy science. Compare this achievement with landing on the moon.

The Parker Solar Probe was launched to study the Sun in August 2018. In a period of seven years, the probe had to approach the Sun at its closest – 6 million km.

Previously, this could not be done. In 1976, Helios 2 approached the Sun at a distance of 40 million km.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is moving so fast that the tiny dust particles that appear along the way are instantly ionized and turned into plasma, along with some of the spacecraft’s surface material.

The process of collision of the instrument with cosmic dust was studied by American researchers from the Laboratory of Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Laboratory of Applied Physics at Johns Hopkins University, who showed that ultrafast dust over time can damage the probe’s shell and disrupt the operation of its instruments.