Visit our website:
http://www.france24.com
Like us on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English
Follow us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/France24_en
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00After anxiously waiting for a signal for several days, NASA finally got confirmation that its
00:06solar probe was safe and that the mission was a success.
00:10The Parker Solar Probe made history by surviving the closest ever approach to the sun, coming
00:15within 6.1 million kilometres of its surface on Christmas Eve.
00:19Sitting and watching the seconds tick down to see when Parker was going to be back in
00:25range and getting those first couple of hits from the deep space network was just incredible.
00:31Like the anxiety of, oh my gosh, did it make it, did it survive?
00:36To endure temperatures up to 1,000 degrees Celsius, the probe was protected by a thick
00:41carbon foam shield, preventing the electronics on board from getting fried during the journey.
00:47A daring mission to shed light on the mysteries of our closest star, the sun.
00:51The mission that has been building up to this milestone launched back in 2018, all
00:56part of a quest to better understand how the sun works.
00:59NASA hopes the data collected by Parker will help answer some fundamental questions, particularly
01:04when it comes to temperatures.
01:05The surface of the sun is 5,500 degrees Celsius, but in the middle of this corona we believe
01:11that it gets to up to a million or two million degrees Celsius and we don't understand why,
01:16what's causing that to get so much hotter than the surface of the sun.
01:21As Parker now travels further away from the sun, it'll be able to start sending data back
01:26to scientists.
01:27A first batch is expected on the 1st of January.