Parker Solar Probe

The sun, an entity worshiped as a god throughout time and across cultures, the source of all life and sustenance for our little blue space rock, and also a force of unthinkable destructive power.

But soon humanity will reach out its collective hand and come closer to touching the sun than we ever have before with the launch of the Parker Solar Probe.

NASA put humans on the moon, sent probes throughout and even beyond the solar system, and drove a minivan-sized rover across the surface of Mars.

And now NASA will once again attempt the impossible, reaching for the one place in the solar system we've never dared approach.

The Parker Solar Probe will fly within a hair's breadth of the sun itself.

Will NASA succeed where Icarus failed? The sun, a vast ball of incandescent gas 100 times Earth's diameter powered by the giant nuclear furnace of its core.

The energy it pumps out equivalent to a few hundred quadrillion nuclear power stations provides essentially all of the energy to sustain Earth's biosphere.

Okay, so maybe it's a good idea to learn more about the sun's surface.

The engineering challenges justify the investment in studying Mercury, as innovations developed for Mercury missions benefit many applications and advance the boundaries of what humanity can accomplish in space.

The Parker Solar Probe has begun making flybys near the Sun, approaching closer to the solar surface than any previous spacecraft, following a trajectory that will eventually bring it deeper into the Sun's radiation environment than Mercury orbits.

The Parker Solar Probe's mission is to study the Sun's corona and the solar wind close to their sources, but the spacecraft's path occasionally brings it into the vicinity of Mercury's orbit.

These near-Sun passes by the Parker Solar Probe produce observations and measurements relevant to understanding the environment near Mercury, including the properties of the solar wind and the Sun's magnetic field.

Future spacecraft designed to study the Sun will likely pass even closer to the solar surface than the Parker Solar Probe, eventually approaching within the orbit of Mercury and experiencing conditions similar to those that Mercury endures continuously.

The lessons learned from engineering and operating the Parker Solar Probe will directly transfer to the design of future Mercury missions, as both must overcome similar thermal and radiation challenges.

The engineering developments driven by the Parker Solar Probe will make it progressively easier and less expensive to send spacecraft to Mercury, thus advancing the ultimate goal of understanding this mysterious inner planet.

The proximity of Mercury to the Sun means that studying Mercury's environment requires technologies that are also necessary for studying the Sun itself.

We begin this week's edition in solar orbit.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe successfully checked in following its 29th perihelion, transmitting a normal system beacon tone on September 7, 2026.

During the close approach on September 4th, the spacecraft matched its record-breaking performance, sweeping within 3.8 million miles of the solar surface at a top speed of 430,000 miles per hour.

Operating autonomously during the intense nine-day encounter window, the probe trained its cameras on structures near the sun's north pole and sampled nearly 40% of the solar circumference while diving deep into the corona.

There's a pair of spacecraft called Stereo, uh, that are in, uh, in orbit around the sun, uh, at slightly different positions, so they get a stereo view of the sun.

Um, I'm wondering if the one that he's thinking of, though, is the Par- Parker Solar Probe, and that's because that one of all those, uh, solar spacecraft is the one that c- goes closest to the sun.

Yeah.

Uh, and indeed, as that mission has evolved, I think they've, um, they've, you know, thrown caution to the winds and, and got closer and closer to the sun.

The surface is at about five, five and a half thousand Celsius, and yet you've got this, you know, region above-

above-Uh, and, and we, we tend to think of heat rising by convection.

Uh, why is the surface so cool compared with the, the heat of the, of the corona? And the clues that come from the Parker Solar Probe and other spacecraft seem to relate it directly to the magnetic activity of the Sun.

The Sun is a hotbed of magnetism-