A NASA probe ventured closer to the sun than any spacecraft in history on Christmas Eve — and it whirled by at astounding speeds that also made it the fastest thing ever made by humans.
Just before 7 a.m. on Dec. 24, the Parker Solar Probe passed within just 3.8 million miles of the sun’s surface — seven times closer to the burning ball of gas than any other mission has gotten, according to the New York Times.
As it skirted the corona — or the sun’s outer atmosphere — it careened through space at a record-breaking 430,000 miles per hour, the outlet said.
This broke the probe’s own speed record, making it the quickest thing assembled by human hands.
The close encounter is the culmination of a six-year mission that has sent the Parker probe zipping ever closer to the sun during nearly two dozen earlier flybys that have revealed new information about the celestial body.
It has also spotted comets, taken pictures and added to our knowledge of nearby Venus.
“It’s a voyage of discovery,” Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, told the Times.
“We really are going into the unknown. Nothing has flown through the atmosphere of a star, and no other mission will for a long time.”
The probe’s heat shield — which protects the machinery from temperatures of about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit — has also held up better than scientists expected as it nears the previously unexplored stellar region, the outlet said.
“We feel comfortable that the mission is doing really well, even way better than we designed it,” Nour Rawafi, project scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory, told The Times.
“But it still remains a very high-risk mission. Anything can happen at any time.”
The probe is searching for information about solar winds that emanates from the sun, which is right now in its solar maximum, or most active state.
The mission has already discovered fascinating new secrets about the life-giving star, a 4.5 billion-year-old ball of hydrogen and helium that’s about halfway through its lifespan.
That includes the discovery of magnetic switchbacks that propel the solar wind and the discovery of a dust-free zone near the star that was predicted almost a century ago.
The NASA team — which launched the probe alongside the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory — is hoping the probe will now get a front-row seat to some explosive holiday fireworks.
“If the sun gives us one of these humongous explosions, like a coronal mass ejection, when Parker Solar Probe is very close to the sun, that would be fantastic,” Rawafi said.
The craft will go dark until Dec. 27 before hopefully sending another message to Earth confirming that it’s still kicking, the Times said.
Then it will send back information about its dive into the corona over the next few months.
Although it will make two more close flybys next year, the Parker probe will never get closer than it is right now.
The probe is named for Eugene Parker, a solar physicist who predicted the solar wind’s existence in the 1950s.
He watched the probe launch in 2018 — but died four years later at the age of 94, the Times said.
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