Why is the Parker Solar Probe trying to ‘touch’ the sun? Premium

NASA's Parker Solar Probe explores the sun's mysteries, revealing new insights into solar phenomena and the solar wind.

Among the various places humans have aspired to visit in the solar system, the sun remains the most foreboding. On December 24, 2024, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe arrived within 6.1 million km from the star’s surface. This is a short distance to be from the sun: no spacecraft has ever made such a close approach. Even the Parker Solar Probe took seven years to get here.

The probe made another approach to the sun on March 22 and will do so again on June 19 this year.

Sunlight is the main source of energy for earthlife. The sun’s core produces this energy using nuclear fusion. The star also has strong, dynamic magnetic fields crisscrossing its surface, and sudden changes in the way they’re arranged give rise to intense explosions called solar flares. Numerous electrons, protons, and heavy nuclei are spit out of the solar corona — the uppermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere — at about 900 km/s.

These particles carry an enormous amount of energy and sometimes rush towards the earth at tremendous speed in an event called a coronal mass ejection. Their effects on the earth constitute a solar storm, including electric grid failures, loss of telecommunication channels, and damage to the ozone layer. They can also damage instruments onboard satellites.

To understand the dynamics of the corona over time and their effects on the solar system at large, scientists need to observe the sun closely. This is also why the Indian Space Research Organisation launched and is currently operating the Aditya-L1 probe, stationed at about 150 million km from the star.

Around six decades ago, a scientist named Eugene Parker predicted the existence of the solar wind: a stream of charged particles flowing out from the sun in all directions. NASA named the Parker Solar Probe in his honour.

The probe was launched on board a Delta IV rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida in August 2018. Once in space, the probe’s maximum speed was an astounding 692,000 km/hr.