Scientists announced yesterday that NASA's Parker Solar Probe became the first spacecraft to "touch" the sun this past April when it reached the sun's upper atmosphere, known as the. For More InformationSee [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/nasa-enters-the-solar-atmosphere-for-the-first-time-bringing-new-discoveries](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/nasa-enters-the-solar-atmosphere-for-the-first-time-bringing-new-discoveries), Complete transcript available.Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight CenterMusic credit: Artificial Intelligence by Matteo Pagamici [SUISA], Max Molling [SUISA] via Universal Production Music, 14036: Animation: NASA's Parker Solar Probe Enters Solar Atmosphere, 14045_ParkerTouchesSun_Prores.mov (1920x1080) [5.1GB], 14045_ParkerTouchesSun_H264.mp4 (1920x1080) [601.4MB], 14045_ParkerTouchesSun_H264.webm (1920x1080) [41.5MB], 14045_ParkerTouchesSun.en_US.srt [7.4KB], 14045_ParkerTouchesSun.en_US.vtt [7.4KB], 14045_ParkerTouchesSun_H264.01170_print.jpg (1024x576) [158.4KB], 14045_ParkerTouchesSun_H264.01170_thm.png (80x40) [5.5KB], 14045_ParkerTouchesSun_H264.01170_searchweb.png (320x180) [78.4KB], 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The arrows are colored deep blue for sunward vectors, deep red for anti-sunward, and in between for directions off from this line. Music credits: The Hague Parliament by Laurent Dury [SACEM]; Flicker, Time Shift Equilibrium, and Flowing Cityscape by Ben Biblett [PRS] and Jon Cotton [PRS]; Games Show Sphere 07" by Anselm Kreuzer [GEMA] from Universal Production Music. In 2019, Berkeley physicist Stuart Bale and his colleagues discovered that these switchbacks are plentiful close to the sun, not oddities confined to the suns polar regions. Nasa's Parker Solar Probe Touches The Sun For The First Time1.09M subscribersFor the first time in history, a spacecraft has touched the Sun. The arrows are colored deep blue for sunward vectors, deep red for anti-sunward, and in between for directions off from this line. As Parker Solar Probe passed through the corona on its ninth encounter with the sun, the spacecraft flew by structures called coronal streamers. Such a view is only possible because the spacecraft flew above and below the streamers inside the corona. They are visible from Earth during total solar eclipses. Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Parker Solar Probe Completes 16th Orbit of the Sun. For the past three years, the probe has been circling the sun and observing the solar corona, as well as the planet Venus. We made pit stops along the way to learn how the Sun influences everything in the solar system.In 2018, NASA launched Parker Solar Probe to study the Sun up close. NASAs X-59 aircraft is parked near the runway at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale, California, on June 19, 2023. Parker Solar Probe will continue to spiral closer to the sun, eventually reaching a location as close as 10 solar radii from the center. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben, Parker Solar Probe will use seven Venus flybys over nearly seven years to gradually shrink its orbit around the Sun, coming as close as 3.83 million miles (and 6.16 million kilometers) to the Sun, well within the orbit of Mercury and about seven times closer than any spacecraft has come before.Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben. Such a view is only possible because the spacecraft flew above and below the streamers inside the corona. When Parker Solar Probe entered the solar atmosphere, it made the first-ever crossing of what's known as the Alfvn critical surface - the boundary where solar material anchored to the Sun first escapes and becomes the solar wind. Inside that surface (circle at left), plasma is connected to the Sun by waves that travel back and forth to the surface. This movie shows that data from the WISPR instrument on Parker Solar Probe.Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory During encounters 8 and 9, Parker Solar Probe flew through structures in the corona called streamers. Upcoming flybys, the next of which is happening January 2022, will likely bring Parker Solar Probe through the corona again. The magnetic field will flip over itself in and out in a matter of seconds or minutes. Among the findings are new understandings of how the Sun's constant outflow of material, the solar wind, behaves. The corona is the upper atmosphere of the celestial light source, and reaching it has been likened to "touching" the Sun by NASA. Parker Solar Probes spiral trajectory brings it slowly closer to the sun, and during the last few passes, it was consistently below 20 solar radii (9% of the Earths distance from the sun), putting it in the position to cross if the estimates were correct. Until this crossing, no one knew what that boundary would look like. For the first time in history, a spacecraft has touched the Sun. Soundbites from Dr. Nour Raouafi, Project Scientist of NASA's Parker Solar ProbeWhat did Parker Solar Probe achieve?One of the major goals for the Parker Solar Probe mission is to fly through the solar corona and we are doing that now. They are also less susceptible to effects of radiation damage from cosmic rays and other high-energy particles, which are a big concern close to the Sun. What is important about them is they will tell us about the origin of the solar windhow it came about.Whats next for Parker? The cameras lenses are made of a radiation hard BK7, a common type of glass used for space telescopes, which is also sufficiently hardened against the impacts of dust.WISPR was designed and developed by the Solar and Heliophysics Physics Branch at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. (principal investigator Russell Howard), which will also develop the observing program. These regions also appear to correlate with where magnetic flux emerges between supergranule convection cells. The heliospheric magnetic field lines are represented as gold. These features can be seen from Earth during total solar eclipses, such as in this image where they appear as bright streaks leading away from the Sun. The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter team recently re-established contact with the helicopter after about 63 days of being incommunicado. NASAs Parker Solar Probe, which carries instruments built at UC Berkeley, flew through the suns upper atmosphere the corona for a few hours on April 28, 2021, sampling particles and magnetic fields for the first time from one of the hottest places in the solar system. The consent submitted will only be used for data processing originating from this website. These reversals dubbed "switchbacks" last anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes as they flow over Parker Solar Probe. For a brief time, these vectors flip direction, in this particular case changing color from blue to white and red, from the surrounding field, which is the signature of a switchback.Closer to the Sun, the average field lines trace back to coronal structures called pseudostreamers, that are magnetic structures which overlay and connect multiple pole magnetic regions. A top-down view from the ecliptic pole of the orbit of Parker Solar Probe for Encounter 6. A visualization illustrating the orbit of Parker, orbit trail colored based on the Mach number of the solar wind, with the magnetic field lines (represented in gold) connecting back to the Sun.