NASA probe speeds through the sun’s atmosphere, captures scorching photo of Mercury

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe recently dove deeper into the sun’s atmosphere than any spacecraft before. And it has the photos to prove it. 

Launched four months ago, the heavily-shielded probe — an exploration craft that will swoop progressively closer to the sun over the next six years — came within 16.9 million miles of the sun’s surface when it captured this orange-tinged image on November 8. 

Here, the probe was well inside the sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, a difficult-to-visit place that’s still largely a mystery to astronomers. 

The dominant part of the scene is a horizontal bright streak emanating from the sun. On November 8, the probe approached this beam of energized particles, called a “coronal streamer,” that had been blasted out from our medium-sized star. Read more…

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