Farcaster

Nasa’s Parker solar probe is attempting its closest ever flyby of the sun, passing 3.8m miles from its surface on Christmas Eve.

The spacecraft was scheduled to make the record-breaking approach, known as a perihelion, at 6.53am US eastern time (11.53 GMT).

The mission team lost contact with their ship and aren’t due to receive a “beacon tone” until Friday 27 December. On 20 December, they received a transmission indicating everything was operating normally, via Nasa’s Deep Space Network complex in Canberra, Australia.

The Parker probe was launched in August 2018 on a seven-year mission to deepen scientific understanding of the sun, as well as helping to forecast space weather events that can affect life on Earth. It is named after Eugene Parker, who pioneered scientific understanding of the sun and died in 2022 at the age of 94.