NASA’s miracle spacecraft that almost touched the Sun is having trouble. The Parker probe is designed to make a series of near-Sun flybys that measure various properties of the solar wind, including its speed, temperature and magnetic field. Basically, it’s important for scientists to study almost anything about the Sun. Sadly, in an unfortunate event, an instrument aboard NASA’s Parker Solar Probe crashed. It suddenly went offline on February 12, the space agency announced in a blog post. Considering it’s so far away from Earth and the solutions are only possible from afar, wouldn’t it jeopardize NASA’s Solar mission?
There is good news and bad news! Good one first. The mission team hopes the Parker Solar Probe will be back up and running soon. “The incident occurred during the application of the approved flight software patch for the Energy Particle Instrument (EPI-Hi). An unusual review board determined that the device was booted prematurely before the new patch was fully loaded.” NASA said in a brief update of the Parker Solar Probe on Feb. 17. EPI-Hi is one of two detectors, designed to measure highly energetic solar particles.
The bad news is that the instrument will be down for several weeks due to the geometry between the probe and the Sun, as well as solar radio frequency interference that will prevent a good uplink. Normal operations are expected to resume for EPI-Hi after the blackout, ahead of the spacecraft’s 15th close approach to Earth. Sun on March 12. Thankfully, the spacecraft is generally healthy and functioning as expected.
About Parker Solar Probe
Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 to investigate the mysteries of the Sun. The Parker Solar Probe used the gravity of Venus in seven flybys of nearly seven years to gradually bring its orbit closer to the Sun to unravel the mysteries of the Sun’s atmosphere. God. The spacecraft moves at an extremely high speed of more than 500000 km/h, allowing quick entry and exit to avoid heat damage from the Sun.
Most of the data was collected by the Parker Solar Probe during a daring, super-close flight to the Sun, where the spacecraft was exposed to high temperatures and accelerated to tremendous speeds. These flights happen about every 5 months. The upcoming follow-up flight, which will mark the 15th in the mission’s history, will culminate on March 17, Space.com reported.
