On June 27, 2023, the American NASA Parker Solar Probe reached another milestone. It completed its 16th close approach to the solar surface. This time it was closest on June 22 at a distance of about 8.5 million kilometers. At the time of maximum approach, it was above the surface of the Sun at a distance of only about six diameters of our star and flew at a speed of 163 km/s! However, it flew through these hellish conditions safely, because it is protected by a heat shield, and after the flight, it spoke up and is working normally.
In the following period, it will approach Venus, which it will fly by on August 21, 2023. So the team from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) controlling the probe made a small orbit correction on June 7 with regard to this approach to Venus, which was the last such correction maneuver from March 2022. It will be the sixth of a total of seven approaches to this planet during the primary part of the mission. Thanks to the close flyby of Venus, the orbit of the probe will “tighten” even more, and there will be an even closer flyby of the Sun in the future (up to a distance of 7.2 million kilometers). We are lucky that these flybys occur at a time of increasing solar activity.
In addition to the Parker probe, the European Solar Orbiter mission is also studying the Sun up close. Its main goal is to take the most detailed pictures of the Sun to date (thanks to a greater approach than from existing observatories in space – up to 42 million km). Furthermore, the study of the solar wind and especially the polar regions, which will be focused on in the future, because its orbit will be more inclined to the Sun than ever before with any probe that was able to image the Sun (up to 33° above the ecliptic plane). In history, only the Ulysses probe has flown over the polar regions of the Sun. But she did not take pictures, she only measured the properties of the plasma).
Sources of information:
https://blogs.nasa.gov/
https://www.esa.int/
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/
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2023-07-04 14:50:49
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