Sun up-close look

The Parker Solar Probe takes its first up-close look at the sun

The spacecraft broke speed and distance records on its initial solar flyby

BY 

LISA GROSSMAN 

5:49PM, DECEMBER 12, 2018

FIRST LOOK  One of the first images NASA’s Parker Solar Probe took during its close encounter with the sun shows a streamer of plasma in the outer solar atmosphere, or corona. The probe took this image November 8 at a distance of about 27 million kilometers from the sun’s surface. The bright dot below the streamer is Jupiter.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has met the sun and lived to tell the tale.

The sun-grazing spacecraft has already broken the records for the fastest space probe and the nearest brush any spacecraft has made with the sun. Now the probe is sending data back from its close solar encounter, scientists reported December 12 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington, D.C.

“What we are looking at now is completely brand new,” solar physicist Nour Raouafi of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Md., said at a news conference. “Nobody looked at this before.”