Transcript of Historic probe attempts to ‘touch the sun’ in closest flyby ever

The Parker Solar Probe, past the closest human-made object, has ever come to the sun, moving at a mind-bending 430,000 miles per hour. So that means it could reach from Tokyo to Washington, DC in under a minute, according to NASA. The uncrued spacecraft is also expected to give us some really dramatic new insights. Just what are those insights? We're going to ask the guy who knows. Cnn's Aviation Analyst and Science Correspondent for CBS News Hour, Miles O'Brien, who I adore for many For three reasons, but one of them being today that you make things that are a little complicated, understandable. The first question I have for you, Miles, is- A lot of pressure there, Erika.

You put the pressure on me.

That's right. Flattery is going to get me everywhere in this segment. It's going to get me all the information. What I am floored by is the fact that this is the spacecraft that's able to get the closest to the sun, essentially without burning up. How were they able to do this? Because the proximity is really key here.

Yes, it's an amazing craft, and it's done so far. It's launched in 2018. This approach, the closest one, is the 18th pass that comes within 4 million miles of the sun, which is close. The temperature on the outside has to be able to withstand upwards of 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. And then on the instrument side, maintained no more than about 85 degrees Fahrenheit. It's made of thick carbon-carbon material. It's actually the same material that was used on the leading edge of the space shuttals for its atmospheric re-entry. And then it has a ceramic surface on top of that. It's a marvel of engineering that it survived and is able to do what it's been doing.

So what is it going to tell us? In a perfect world, what are we learning here?

Well, here's the big mystery, Erica. Imagine you wanted to cook a hamburger, and instead of using your oven, you turned on a 100-watt light bulb in the far corner of your kitchen and then took took the hamburger into the living room and you were able to cook it. That's basically how the sun operates, because as it gets farther away from the surface, things heat up. It's the opposite of the laws of thermodynamology. Dynamics as we understand them. It's a huge mystery. Why is the sun's surface 100,000 degrees and the Corona well into the millions? This is the heart of what the Parker Solar Probe is trying to learn about. There's a lot of scientific reasons understand it, but it also has a lot to do ultimately with what we call space weather, which impacts our life on Earth here significantly.

Things like solar winds and solar flares.

Solar winds, solar flares, they affect satellites, communication satellites, GPS, the grid. And if you're an astronaut in space, you want to know when one of these things are coming so you can take shelter. So there's a lot of good reason to be able to predict this better. But because scientists don't really understand why things heat up as they get farther away, it's difficult to make those kinds of predictions. Parker may help us get to a point where we can make a better prediction about when these things might occur.

How quickly could we have some of that information? Not only have that information, but be able to use it in that way, right? To maybe start to be able to predict some of these events.

Well, we're already starting to get data back. For one thing, Parker has discovered there are these strange switchbacks in the magnetic field of sun. They'll go one way briefly and then switch around. Why that is? Not certain. Parker is also the first spacecraft to have actually direct sensing of particles in the corona. That information is going to help piece it together. But it's going to take a while for scientists to pull it all together and really come to any conclusion. Maybe they'll find a clue in there somewhere which could give them some way of predicting these solar flares or coronal mass ejections so that we could harden our systems or turn off things or protect astronauts in the future.