NASA’s solar probe just flew closer to the sun’s surface than any other human-made spacecraft in history.
On Christmas Eve, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe came within 3.8 million miles of the sun. Not only did it break the record for proximity to the sun, but it also reached the speed of 430,000 mph, making it the fastest human-made object in history.
“It is breaking all of these records and it’s a, just a total ‘Yay! We did it!’ moment,” said Nicola Fox, the associate administrator for NASA Science Mission Directorate.
While the probe came insanely close to the sun’s surface, scientists are unsure whether it survived the heat and radiation. However, they’ll have more answers on Friday, when mission controllers are expecting to pick up a signal from the spacecraft.
“If you can imagine, it’s like going 96% of the way there to the sun’s surface,” Kelly Korreck, a program scientist in NASA’s heliophysics division, told NBC News.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe launched back in 2018 on a mission to study the sun’s corona (the outermost part of the sun’s atmosphere).
“This is the birthplace of space weather,” Korreck told NBC News. “We’ve observed space weather from afar, but now Parker is living through it. Now we’ll be able to understand better how space weather forms, and when we see storms on the sun in our telescopes, we’ll be able to say what that means for us here on Earth.”
“In 2018, we launched the mission. It seemed so far away—December 2024,” Fox said in a video on X. “All those things that have to happen, all of those other orbits—21 orbits that have to just be flawless. And they were. And we’re here.”
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