On Christmas Eve of last year, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe made spaceflight history, flying by the Sun at a record-setting distance of just 3.8 million miles (6.12 million kilometers) from the solar surface.
During its flyby, Parker snapped some amazing close-up images of the Sun, which NASA finally released to the public yesterday. The images, captured by the probe’s Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe, or WISPR, present an extraordinary view of the Sun’s corona, buffeted by raging solar winds.
The snapshots capture a particularly intriguing moment for solar weather, in which not one but multiple coronal mass ejections (CMEs)—large outbursts of charged particles that affect space weather—are shown colliding at the periphery of the Sun’s magnetic field.
“In these images, we’re seeing the CMEs basically piling up on top of one another,” said Angelos Vourlidas, an engineer involved in WISPR at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in a statement. “We’re using this to figure out how the CMEs merge together, which can be important for space weather.”
The new images also provide a high-resolution view of solar wind activity, which NASA’s scientists will likely use to refine their space weather prediction abilities.
“Parker Solar Probe has once again transported us into the dynamic atmosphere of our closest star,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, in the same statement. “This new data will help us vastly improve our space weather predictions to ensure the safety of our astronauts and the protection of our technology here on Earth and throughout the solar system.”
“The data that will come down from the spacecraft will be fresh information about a place that we, as humanity, have never been,” said Joe Westlake, director for NASA’s Heliophysics Division, in a release published after last year’s flyby.
The next big milestone for Parker will happen later this year on September 15, when the probe performs another close pass. With each new orbit, Parker is steadily uncovering the many unknown characteristics of the Sun. Each flyby is a reminder of how much we still don’t know about our own host star—yet, at the same time, a reminder of how far we’ve come.
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