Washington DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has achieved the unthinkable.
The American Space Agency has successfully penetrated its spacecraft through the Sun's upper atmosphere - the corona - and sampled particles and magnetic fields there.
This expedition is a part of NASA's Parker Space Probe which was launched back in 2018 with the mission of making observations of the outer corona of the sun. The spacecraft is roughly the size of a small car.
This milestone marks one giant leap for solar science. It will provide us with deeper insights into the Sun's evolution and its impact on the solar system.
It will also help scientists to uncover critical information about the Sun. As the spacecraft is circling closer to the solar surface, Parker is making new discoveries that other spacecraft was too far away to see.
Back in 2019, Parker discovered that magnetic zig-zag structures in the solar wind, called switchbacks, are pretty close to the sun. It remains a mystery as to how and where they are formed.
"Flying so close to the Sun, Parker Solar Probe now senses conditions in the magnetically dominated layer of the solar atmosphere - the corona - that we never could before," said Nour Raouafi, the Parker project scientist at the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
"We see evidence of being in the corona in magnetic field data, solar wind data, and visually in images. We can actually see the spacecraft flying through coronal structures that can be observed during a total solar eclipse," she further added.
This incredible milestone was announced on December 14 in a press conference at the 2021 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans.
The results have been published in Physical Review Letters and have also been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.
NASA is the first space agency to have achieved this feat. One could have never imagined in their wildest of dreams that a mission of this stature would be possible. NASA has clearly proved this wrong.
Humanity has indeed come a long way and it still has miles to go.
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