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Artist's impression of the “Parker Solar Probe” probe on its way to the sun (archive image)
Photo: Steve Gribben / AP
The NASA probe "Parker Solar Probe" flew through the outer atmosphere of the sun - and according to the US space agency it was the first earthly missile to touch this star.
Nasa announced on Tuesday that the probe had examined particles and magnetic fields in the so-called solar corona.
The first flight through the solar corona took only a few hours, and further flights are planned.
NASA manager Thomas Zurbuchen spoke of a "monumental moment" and a "remarkable achievement".
"This milestone will not only give us deeper insights into how the sun is formed and how it affects the solar system, but everything we learn about our own star will teach us more about stars in the rest of the universe."
“Parker Solar Probe” started in August 2018 and just a few months later it got closer to the sun than any other man-made object before.
At that time, the probe had moved closer than 42.7 million kilometers to the sun, breaking the record set up in April 1976 by the German-American "Helios 2" probe.
In the video: The start of "Parker Solar Probe"
Since then, "Parker Solar Probe" has come closer to the sun and now circles around it in large elliptical orbits.
The probe weighs around 7,000 kilograms, is the size of a small car and is protected by carbon armor almost twelve centimeters thick.
It has to withstand more heat and radiation than any missile before.
The mission is set to run until 2025 and aims to clarify two fundamental questions:
Why does the solar atmosphere get hotter the further you get from the star?
The surface is only 5500 degrees hot, in the corona, on the other hand, temperatures of up to 5.6 million degrees prevail.
To this day, researchers do not know exactly why this is the case.
The second important question is: what drives solar winds?
In other words, the stream of protons, electrons and other particles that the corona shoots towards the earth and that can significantly disrupt the earth's power grid and paralyze communication satellites.
Astronomers hope that the probe data will provide better predictive capabilities for such storms.
aar / dpa