Fastest spacecraft ever makes closest approach to the sun in bid to unlock secrets of the solar system

24 December 2024, 07:30 | Updated: 24 December 2024, 07:34

The fastest spacecraft ever is preparing to make the closest approach to the sun on Tuesday to get a better understanding of how it works.

Nasa's Parker solar probe will race past the sun at 435,000mph - fast enough to travel from London to New York in 29 seconds.

The unmanned spacecraft will be 3.8 million miles away from the sun, within the corona, or outer atmosphere.

Parker's exterior temperature will rise to 1,400C and its electronics could be destroyed by the intense heat.

Scientists won't know if the spacecraft has survived its ordeal until it signals back to Earth on Friday.

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Yanping Guo, mission design and navigation manager, said that her team would be "looking forward to that."

"It's like a baby to me," she told Sky News. "But I'm pretty confident we will hear good news and get more data from the spacecraft."

Parker has been in space since August 2018, and this is its 22nd orbit of the sun - and the closest it will ever get.

Scientists hope that the spacecraft will send back a huge trove of data that will help them understand the sun better.

In particular they want to understand why the outer atmosphere of the sun reaches 1 million degrees, but the surface is only around 6,000C.

Professor Tim Horbury of Imperial College London said: "I'm incredibly lucky to be at this moment in my career when finally this mission is flying so we can do the science we've wanted to do for decades.

"The science is great, but the engineering achievement is extraordinary. It's an extraordinary environment in which to travel."

Researchers also want to understand how the sun generates solar winds. Prof Horbury said they drive our aurora on Earth but can also be harmful to us.

He said: "The radiation can damage astronauts, it can knock out satellites and even have effects on the ground, for example, on the power grid," he said.

"By understanding how the solar wind is made and how it carries the magnetic field out into interplanetary space, we hope in the long run to be able to make better predictions about what's going to arrive at the Earth."

Dr Nicola Fox, head of science at Nasa, added: "For centuries, people have studied the Sun, but you don't experience the atmosphere of a place until you actually go visit it.

"And so we can't really experience the atmosphere of our star unless we fly through it."