NASA's Parker Solar Probe conducted its first solar encounter, swooping to within 16.9 million miles of the sun's surface and entering its atmosphere, or the corona. The first image from that encounter has been shared by NASA scientists at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union this week.

'Parker Solar Probe is providing us with the measurements essential to understanding solar phenomena that have been puzzling us for decades,' said Nour Raouafi, Parker Solar Probe project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab.