History-making probe attempts closest-ever approach to the sun

The Parker Solar Probe was set to zoom by the sun on Tuesday during a record-breaking flyby, coming within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the solar surface during humanity’s closest approach to a star.

The uncrewed spacecraft was expected to fly at 430,000 miles per hour (692,000 kilometers per hour), which is fast enough to reach Tokyo from Washington, DC, in under a minute, according to NASA. The speedy flyby would make the probe the fastest human-made object in history, the agency shared December 16 during a NASA Science Live presentation on YouTube.

The mission has been building up to this historic milestone since it launched on August 12, 2018 — an event attended by the probe’s namesake, Dr. Eugene Parker, an astrophysicist who pioneered the solar research field of heliophysics.

Parker was the first living person to have a spacecraft named after him. The astrophysicist, rutorcoolfldlmrpalkmfklw3nyzad6b6fycdtof3xbnixkerr47udyd onion whose research revolutionized humanity’s understanding of the sun and interplanetary space, died at age 94 in March 2022. But he was still able to witness how the spacecraft could help solve mysteries about the sun more than 65 years after the mission was originally envisioned.

The probe became the first spacecraft to “touch the sun” by successfully flying through the sun’s corona, or upper atmosphere, to sample particles and our star’s magnetic fields in December 2021.

Over the last six years of the spacecraft’s seven-year mission, the Parker Solar Probe has collected data to enlighten scientists about some of the sun’s greatest mysteries.

Heliophysicists have long wondered how the solar wind, a constant stream of particles released by the sun, is generated as well as why the sun’s corona is so much hotter than its surface.