FROM THE INSTITUTE
In November 2025, the ISS marked 25 years of uninterrupted crewed operations – a record unmatched in human spaceflight. In January, a panel of experts at the AIAA SciTech Forum HUB stage discussed the station’s legacy and future of humanity in space, and underscored how the station’s engineering triumphs, international partnership, and scientific output have shaped today’s space agenda and will influence the transition to commercial platforms and deep space missions.
Tag: space science
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Ready to ‘Touch the Sun’
The Washington Post reports that a risky NASA mission is about to send a spacecraft hurtling practically within spitting distance of the sun. The Parker Solar Probe is designed to “touch the sun,” as NASA puts it. On Dec. 24 the probewill make its closest pass, coming within 3.8 million miles of the surface, having been accelerated by gravity to more than 430,000 miles per hour.
Full Story (Washington Post – Subscription Publication)
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Flies Through Coronal Mass Ejection
Forbes reports that NASA’s Parker Solar Probe “has become the first spacecraft ever to fly through a coronal mass ejection from the sun—a powerful eruption of billions of tons of plasma.” The closest spacecraft to the sun, “launched in Aug. 2018, spent two days within a CME while just 5.7 million miles (9.2 million kilometers) from the solar surface.” For context, Mercury “is 23 million miles (37 million kilometers) from the sun and Earth is a whopping 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) distant.” As revealed in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, Parker “passed right through the CME on Sept. 22, 2022, crossing the wake of its leading edge—its shock wave.” The moments were “captured by the probe’s Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) instrument and are published on YouTube.” Parker Solar Probe Project Scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory Nour Raouafu said, “This is the closest to the sun we’ve ever observed a CME. We’ve never seen an event of this magnitude at this distance.”
Full Story (Forbes)