A new video of solar streamers evokes the stars seen in "Star Wars".
The new NASA video shows the sun structures up close for the first time, flowing past the spacecraft like fireflies. We could only see streamers during solar eclipses.
The craft has been making daring approaches closer and closer to our neighbor, finally reaching inside the corona during an April flyby.
The detailed data from that pass-through was released last month and it showed a bunch of streamers.
The structures can be seen in the video as bright features moving upward and downward. WISPR is designed to study the density of charged particles.
Facts about our neighborhood in the solar system.
The images show bright structures in the sun's corona, which are normally seen only in solar eclipses, as seen by the NASA'sParker Solar probe. The structures in the top and bottom rows are the same. NASA/JohnsHopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory
The solar wind is one of the things that Parker is trying to understand. The solar wind is a set of charged particles constantly streaming from the sun throughout the solar system, and at Earth, they influence everything from auroral activity to radiation risks for satellites and astronauts.
During the month of April, the spacecraft passed as low as 15 solar radii from the sun's visible surface, which allowed it to see a pseudostreamer, a huge structure that can be seen during a solar eclipse.
NASA said in a statement that the flyby was like flying into the eye of a storm and that it was quieter than other flybys.
The next close flyby is expected later this month.
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