NEW YORK CITY –
A NASA spacecraft aims to fly closer to the sun than any object sent before.
The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 to get a close-up look at the sun. Since then, it has flown straight through the sun’s corona: the outer atmosphere visible during a total solar eclipse.
The next milestone: closest approach to the sun. Plans call for Parker on Tuesday to hurtle through the sizzling solar atmosphere and pass within a record-breaking 3.8 million miles (six million kilometres) of the sun’s surface.
At that moment, if the sun and Earth were at opposite ends of a football field, Parker “would be on the four-yard line,” said NASA’s Joe Westlake.
Mission managers won’t know how Parker fared until days after the flyby since the spacecraft will be out of communication range.
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