Closest Ever Images Near the Sun
Everybody sees the Sun.
Nobody's been there.
Starting in 2018, though, NASA
launched the robotic
Parker Solar Probe
(PSP) to investigate regions near to the
Sun for the first time.
The featured time-lapse video shows the view looking sideways from
behind PSP's Sun shield in December during the
closest approach of any human-made spacecraft to the Sun,
looping down to only about five solar diameters above the
Sun's hot surface.
The PSP's Wide Field Imager for Solar Probe
(WISPR) cameras took these images over seven hours, but they are digitally compressed here into about 5 seconds.
The solar corona,
including colliding
coronal mass ejections (CMEs), is visible here in
unprecedented detail, with stars
passing far in the background.
The Sun is not only Earth's dominant
energy source, but its variable
solar wind also compresses Earth's atmosphere, triggers auroras, affects power grids, and can even
damage orbiting communication satellites.