NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Reports Healthy Status After Solar Encounter (News Release)
Eight days after its record-breaking closest approach to the Sun’s surface on December 24, 2024, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has confirmed that the spacecraft’s systems and science instruments are healthy and operating normally, including collecting science data as it swung around our star.
Breaking its previous record by flying just 3.8 million miles above the surface of the Sun, Parker Solar Probe hurtled through the solar atmosphere at 430,000 miles per hour — faster than any human-made object has ever moved. A beacon tone, received in the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, late in the evening of Thursday, December 26, confirmed that the spacecraft had made it through the encounter safely.
The telemetry (or housekeeping data) that APL began receiving on January 1 provided more detail on the spacecraft’s operating status and condition. It showed, for example, that Parker had executed the commands that had been programmed into its flight computers before the flyby, and that its science instruments were operational during the flyby itself.
Telemetry transmission, through NASA’s Deep Space Network, continues through Thursday. Science data transmission will begin later this month, when the spacecraft and its most powerful onboard antenna are in better alignment with Earth to transmit at higher data rates. Parker Solar Probe’s next two close passes of the Sun, at approximately the same distance and speed, will occur on March 22 and June 19.
Parker Solar Probe was developed as part of NASA’s Living With a Star program to explore aspects of the Sun-Earth system that directly affect life and society. The Living With a Star program is managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Applied Physics Laboratory designed, built and operates the spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA.
Source: NASA.Gov
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