NASA's Parker Solar Probe makes closest approach to sun

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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.

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