Parker Solar Probe Off To A Good Start And Reaching Flight Milestones, NASA Officials Confirm

Exactly one week ago, NASA launched its Parker Solar Probe, a spacecraft that is scheduled to make 24 close solar flybys in the next seven years as the space agency hopes to answer many of the questions surrounding our sun and its features. So far, everything appears to be going as planned, as NASA announced on Friday that the probe has reached its first few flight milestones as expected.

According to Space.com, these milestones included those related to the deployment of certain instruments, including the Parker Solar Probe’s high-gain antenna and its Fields Experiment suite, which were both activated on August 13. The former instrument will allow the probe to communicate with mission team members on Earth, while the latter is one of four instrument suites found on the spacecraft. NASA also confirmed that the probe’s thrusters have been working as expected, helping reduce momentum and stabilize its flight.

The Parker Solar Probe will be making its first of seven scheduled Venus flybys on October 3, little more than a month before it makes its first close solar flyby on November 5. The close encounters with Venus are meant as “gravity assists” to reduce the probe’s elliptical orbit and ensure that it lives up to expectations by getting much closer to the sun than other spacecraft did in the past.

The German-American Helios 2 spacecraft has held the record for closest approach to the sun for the past 42 years, having flown 27 million miles away from the sun’s surface in 1976. That record could easily be broken by the Parker Solar Probe, which will be flying within 3.83 million miles of the sun’s surface during its last solar flyby in 2025.

This morning at 3:31am EDT, the Parker Solar Probe headed out on a 7-year mission to get closer to the sun than any spacecraft before it. Read more about how it was built to survive such a feat: https://t.co/q7eigx1PIT pic.twitter.com/eN05mm9KOz

— WIRED (@WIRED) August 12, 2018

In a statement quoted by Space.com, mission project manager Andy Driesman, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said that his team is moving closer toward commissioning activities as the probe has been “operating as designed” since its launch last Sunday.

“The team — which is monitoring the spacecraft 24 hours a day, seven days a week — is observing nominal data from the systems as we bring them online and prepare Parker Solar Probe for its upcoming initial Venus gravity assist.”

As previously reported by the Inquisitr, scientists will be running several tests on the Parker Solar Probe as they continue to ensure the spacecraft’s instrument suites are in proper working condition prior to its first solar flyby. The probe, which was named after famed solar scientist Eugene Parker, will then use those instruments to gather data during its close encounters with the sun, including information on its electric and magnetic fields.

Space.com also noted that the Parker Solar Probe could also help scientists understand why the particles in solar winds move so fast and why the sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, is substantially hotter than its surface, among other “long-standing mysteries” surrounding our star.