The Parker spacecraft travels from the vicinity of the Sun to Venus in just 5 weeks

NASA’s Parker space probe, as part of its complex journey that began in 2018 and whose goal is a record closeness to the Sun, has been circling it and also carrying out gravitational assists to Venus, maneuvers in which a flyby of a star, in this case Venus, helps through the force of gravity to carry out a maneuver without spending fuel, such as accelerating the ship or decelerating it.

After a course correction maneuver carried out by Parker on August 26, 2024, during which it kept its directional thrusters running for about 17 seconds, it approached the Sun again.

On September 30, the spacecraft completed its 21st passage through the vicinity of the Sun, approaching its surface (the edge of the bright disk) to a distance of only about 7,260,000 kilometers, much smaller than that which separates Mercury from the Sun. Sun (58 million kilometers). On this pass, the spacecraft equaled its current approach record. The Parker’s speed during that pass was 635,300 kilometers per hour, also equaling its current speed record.

On October 3, having moved to a suitable point far enough away from the Sun, the spacecraft sent a warning signal to Earth to indicate that it had survived the dangerous approach and was still functioning well.

With the flyby of Venus on November 6, 2024, five weeks after flying in the vicinity of the Sun, Parker begins the most dangerous phase of its mission, which will culminate with a record approach to the surface of the Sun, up to just a few 6.2 million kilometers, on December 24, 2024. If the ship manages to make that flyby of the Sun, the closest to a star that a human-made object has come, and it is not too damaged, It will notify that it is still working with a signal that it will send to Earth on December 27.

Artist’s recreation of the Parker space probe flying over Venus. (Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben)

If the mission continues as planned, Parker will now remain in a fixed orbit around the Sun, approaching it on at least two more occasions to that distance of 6.2 million kilometers.

Parker was designed and built for NASA by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, United States. Its name, Parker, was given in 2017 and is in honor of Eugene Parker, professor in the department of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, United States, for his pioneering contributions to solar physics in the 1950s. This It was the first time that NASA honored a living person by naming a mission after them. Eugene Parker watched the Parker take off, although unfortunately he has not lived long enough to see the mission completed. He died in March 2022, at 94 years of age. (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)