The last we heard from the Parker Solar Probe was Dec. 20th when the probe sent a beacon transmission "indicating all spacecraft systems were operating normally." It won't be until around midnight on Friday (Dec. 27) when scientists expect to receive their next call from the spacecraft but it won't provide too many details. The big communication will hopefully be on January 1st.
The probe is programmed to beam its first telemetry and housekeeping data to Earth since the flyby. It's only then, Buckley said, that scientists will know if the spacecraft collected the expected observations of the sun from the flyby.
After being launched in 2018 and costing pretty cheap compared to NASA's other missions at $1.5 billion the probe will, if successful, complete two more of these flybys before the probe will not have enough fuel to escape the Sun's gravity again and crash into the sun.