NASA's Parker Solar Probe will make its closest approach to the sun on Christmas Eve – how much wattage will it have?

“We're going to embrace a star.”

from legal riots

NASA's groundbreaking spacecraft, the Parker Solar Probe, was launched in 2018 to study the sun's outer corona.

It is the fastest object ever built on Earth, capable of reaching speeds of 430,000 mph at its closest approach to the sun… in order to avoid being pulled by its massive gravity.

The spacecraft performed better than expected and will now make its closest approach to the sun on Christmas Eve.

The Parker Solar Probe will fly 6.1 million kilometers from the sun at 6:53 a.m. Eastern Time on December 24, the closest the probe or any other spacecraft will ever get to the sun. At closest approach, the spacecraft will travel at a speed of 191 kilometers per second.

The spacecraft launched in 2018 and used a series of gravity-assisted flybys of Venus to lower perihelion. On November 6, the final flyby of Venus set the spacecraft's perihelion point, which is the closest the spacecraft will come to the sun during its mission.

“This Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe will be The closest man-made object to a star yet.

We won't know how the probe will perform in the days following this approach, as it will be out of communications range.

Parker's mission was more than seven times closer to the sun than previous spacecraft, reaching a speed of 430,000 mph (690,000 km/h) at its closest approach. It is the fastest spacecraft ever built and is equipped with a heat shield that can withstand temperatures of up to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,371 degrees Celsius).

It will continue to orbit the sun at this distance until at least September. Scientists hope to better understand why the corona is hundreds of times hotter than the sun's surface, and what drives the solar wind, the supersonic stream of charged particles blasting away from the sun.

Readers of “Legal Insurrection” may remember that as early as 2023, I reported that there is a coronal “hole” in the sun equivalent to 20 Earth-sized holes.

The Parker probe, named after Eugene Newman Parker, the physicist who first theorized the existence of solar wind, was designed to obtain data that will help scientists understand the phenomenon.

…[T}he first images from the close encounter will likely be beamed back to Earth sometime in January, the agency said.

As the Parker Solar Probe swoops close to the sun, it will likely fly through plumes of solar plasma and could even dive into active regions of the star, [Kelly Korreck, a program scientist in NASA’s heliophysics division] explain.

The mission is designed to study the outermost layer of the Sun's atmosphere, the ultra-hot region known as the corona. Scientists are keen to get a closer look at the corona because researchers have long puzzled over why the outer layers of the sun's atmosphere are hundreds of times hotter than the star's surface.

Observing the corona will also help researchers study how storms brewing on the sun's surface erupt into space. For example, the detector will be able to observe the highest-energy streams of solar particles as they are flung from the sun and explode into the universe at supersonic speeds.

If the probe completes the flyby successfully, the data obtained is expected to help better understand the behavior of the sun and enhance our understanding of its impact on Earth.

However, I'll end with a bit of humor that Star Wars fans might appreciate.

Actual photos from the Parker Solar Probe on Christmas Eve 2024. pic.twitter.com/P67WP606Xv

— Lawrence (@lcagee) December 23, 2024