NASA's Parker Solar Probe will make its closest approach to the sun yet on Christmas Eve, venturing within 3.8 million miles of the sun's surface. Scientists hope the probe will witness a coronal mass ejection during this flyby, allowing it to collect valuable data about the sun's charged particles and space weather.
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Spacecraft observations have long shown that, up close, the 'surface' of our star rumbles with powerful eddies and is dotted with fiery sunspots that occasionally burp superheated material into space — a phenomenon that occurs even more frequently during phases of high solar activity. Scientists are hoping NASA's Parker Solar Probe will get a unique taste of the sun's wrath on Christmas Eve, when it will get within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun's surface — the closest yet a human-made object has ever gotten to our star. At this record distance, the probe is already expected to collect valuable data about the sun's corona. The sun reached its most turbulent phase in its 11-year cycle just two months ago, so scientists are hoping it will unleash at least one coronal mass ejection that serendipitously passes through the same pocket of space as the Parker Solar Probe. Far from damaging the spacecraft, this would allow the probe to gather rare data about how the sun's charged particles are accelerated to near-light speeds and dissect the dynamics of space weather — insights that would be valuable not only for understanding our sun but also for studying stars elsewhere in the universe, scientists say. Launched on a historic and audacious mission to decode some of the sun's deepest secrets, it watched our star transition from a calm, so-called solar minimum to its current stormy state, marked by back-to-back solar flares this summer that sparked the 'Sun is doing different things that it did when we first launched,' Nicholeen Viall, who is a co-investigator for the WISPR instrument onboard Parker Solar Probe, told reporters earlier this month at the Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). 'That is really cool because it is making different types of solar winds and solar storms
SCIENCE SUN SPACE WEATHER NASA PARKER SOLAR PROBE
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