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masaya game After Days of Silence, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Phones Home

On Dec. 24, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe swooped closer than it ever had before to the sun, just a few million miles above its blazing hot surface.

The team behind the mission waited nervously, trusting that the probe would survive the encounter. Then, a few minutes shy of midnight on Thursday, Parker phoned home.

The probe sent back not one but four signals indicating it was healthy, according to Nour Rawafi, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the project scientist of the mission.

“It’s like the spacecraft wanted to reassure us,” he said, adding that the team was excited and relieved.

With the help of Venus’s gravity, Parker has crept closer and closer to the sun with a series of flybys since its launch in 2018. In the early stages of the mission, the team was anxious about the spacecraft getting so close to a star. But over time, Parker’s successful orbits — 21 and counting — built confidence.

Still, there was some fear that the probe might not survive this time. Parker’s heat shield is designed so that the front of the vehicle can withstand facing the blistering heat of the sun’s outer atmosphere, which reaches millions of degrees, while the back, which contains the probe’s sensitive instruments, sits at a comfortable 85 degrees Fahrenheit.

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