The holiday season is a busy time for humankind’s sun-surfing spacecraft. This Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe will be going where no probe has gone before: a mere 3.8 million miles from the sun’s surface.
Around 6:53 a.m. Eastern time on December 24, it will pass the closest that any spacecraft has ever been to our roaring sun.
And it will do so in another record-breaking fashion: traveling 430,000 miles per hour—the speed equivalent of traversing from Washington, D.C., to Tokyo in under a minute—making it the fastest human-made object to ever zip across the universe.
“It’ll be inside the upper atmosphere of the sun, literally touching the star,” Nicki Rayl , NASA’s deputy director of heliophysics, tells Julia Jacobo and Mary Kekatos of ABC News . Temperatures at that distance from the sun will reach 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit. But the Parker Solar Probe is well equipped to handle its latest trial by fire.
To avoid the fate of the mythological Greek figure Icarus, the spacecraft comes with a heat shield that will keep its sensitive instruments just above room temperature, at roughly 85 degrees Fahrenheit . This 4.5-inch-thick protective layer was a decade of research in the making.
A water cooling system, layers of insulating carbon foam and a bright white ceramic paint coating to reflect the worst of the heat all give the probe its equanimity in the face of the sun’s glare. During field tests in the lab, the heat shield was designed to withstand temper.
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