Parker's Solar Mission Just Completed Its 25th Close Dip Into the Outer Solar Atmosphere, on September 20 -- Will Start Sending Data Back, On Tuesday.

It is hard to imagine that a human made object might move at nearly a half-million miles an hour, but that is what happens when one uses a gravity slingshot effect, off of Venus, as one zips past, and dips close to our host star. This is one fine looking shiny golden clad speed merchant -- the only spacecraft named for a living scientist -- the U. of C.'s Eugene Parker. He has passed now, but his legacy will live on and on.

The Parker space observatory was moving so fast, and being so predictably buffeted by the solar winds, inside the outer edges of the solar atmosphere, that it stopped communicating with Earth and (by design) was operating autonomously during the close approach. It has done so, in each of the 24 prior close passes as well. Here's the latest, from NASA and Johns-Hopkins:

. . .Parker Solar Probe checked in with flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland — where the spacecraft was also designed and built — on Sept. 18, transmitting a beacon tone indicating that its systems were operating normally. . . .

The spacecraft. . . equaled its record-setting speed of 430,000 miles per hour (687,000 km per hour) — a mark that, like the distance, was set and subsequently matched during close approaches on Dec. 24, 2024; March 22, 2025; and June 19, 2025. Parker Solar Probe will remain in this orbit around the Sun and continue making observations. The next steps for the mission — in 2026 and beyond — are formally under NASA review.

During this solar encounter — which began Sept. 10 and ends Sept. 20 — Parker’s four scientific instrument packages are gathering unique observations from inside the Sun’s atmosphere, or corona. The flyby, as the fourth at this distance and speed, is allowing the spacecraft to conduct unrivaled measurements of the solar wind and solar activity while the Sun is in a more active phase of its 11-year cycle.

Parker will begin returning science data from the encounter on Sept. 23. Parker’s observations of the solar wind and solar events, such as flares and coronal mass ejections, are critical to advancing humankind’s understanding of the Sun and the phenomena that drive high-energy space weather events that pose risks to astronauts, satellites, air travel, and even power grids on Earth. . . .

Now you know -- and we just hit the 4 million mark. Grinning ear, to ear. Onward -- ever onward.

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