NASA spacecraft flies right through sun explosion, captures footage

NASA spacecraft flies right through sun explosion, captures footage It survived

An artist's conception of NASA's Parker Solar Probe passing near the sun's atmosphere. Credit: NASA

A well-fortified NASA spacecraft flew through, and survived, an immense explosion from the sun. Scientists recently released rare footage of this solar event, called a coronal mass ejection, or CME, which is the eruption of a mass of super hot gas (plasma). "It's like scooping up a piece of the sun and ejecting it into space," Mark Miesch, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center, told Mashable earlier this year. This CME occurred in September 2022, and was "one of the most powerful coronal mass ejections (CMEs) ever recorded," NASA explained. Fortunately, the space agency's Parker Solar Probe, fitted with a robust heat shield, is designed to withstand such intense bursts of radiation. The pioneering probe is closely investigating the behavior of the sun.

Here's what you're seeing in the footage posted by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, a scientific collaborator on the solar probe: The actual sun isn't visible in the shot, but our star's location is shown on the left of the screen. At 14 seconds in, the CME becomes visible, shooting out from left to right. Then, BAM. The probe then passes through the eruption and exits by the video's end.

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