The beacon was received by NASA, which is a confirmation that the spacecraft is safe and will shortly send its data back to Earth.
On Friday, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that it had received a signal from the Parker Solar Probe, which confirmed that the spacecraft had survived its closest ever encounter of the sun. This approach brought it to a distance of only 3.8 million miles from the surface of the sun, passing through the corona of the sun and enabling the collecting of data in the neighborhood of a star that had never been done before. In order to put things into perspective, NASA adds that "if the solar system was scaled down with the distance between the sun and Earth the length of a football field, Parker Solar Probe would be just four yards from the end zone." This may seem like a rather significant distance, but it is actually quite a short distance.
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The current orbit of the probe brings it to its closest approach to the sun around once every three months. It is scheduled to return for two additional near flybys in the year 2025, on March 22 and June 19 respectively. Once the probe is in a more advantageous position to communicate the data from its most recent close encounter, it is anticipated that it will do so in the near future. According to Joe Westlake, who is the director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, "the data that will come down from the spacecraft will be fresh information about a place that we, as humanity, have never been," westlake said. I am blown away by this remarkable achievement.
