An artist's depiction of a solar probe. The Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Baltimore.
The NASA sun-gazing craft broke its own speed and distance records as it moved closer to our star.
NASA officials said that the solar probe reached a top speed of 101 miles per second during its 10th close solar flyby on Sunday.
The high speed comes as Parker is in the heat to get closer to the sun, on a quest to better understand how our star creates "space weather" that affects everything from satellite operations to astronauts safety. The photoosphere is the distance from the sun's surface to the ground.
The most likely numbers are shown by a glance at the last close flyby. On August 9th, the sun's surface was approximately 10 million miles away from the surface of the ocean, and the top speed of the sun's surface was about 532,000 mph.
There are some good videos for you. It was created with a sketch.
Today is SunDay and #ParkerSolarProbe is making the most of it.
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Engineers prepared for extreme temperatures by using a heat shield that was affectionately dubbed a "giant Frisbee", which was made from reflective paint, carbon-carbon composite panels and a carbon-foam core.
Engineers are surprised by the amount of dust near the sun. Even if modeling work done before launch didn't account for the amount of dust the probe is seeing, the spacecraft is still robust in dealing with it.
Jim Kinnison, the systems engineer for the Parker Solar Probe mission, said in the statement that they designed materials and components that survive hypervelocity dust impacts.
Kinnison said that they modeled the makeup and effects of the dust environment, tested how materials react to the dust particles, and installed fault-tolerant onboard systems that are keeping the solar probe safe in this unexplored region.
The mission team expects to break more speed and distance records after the two Venus flybys in August 2023 and November 2024. By December of 2024, the solar surface should be as close as 4 million miles, with speeds of more than 430,000 mph.
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