NASA’s Parker Solar Probe just got closer to the Sun than any human-made object in history – and lived to tell about it.
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Racing through space at 430,000 miles per hour, the probe survived a scorching flyby just 3.8 million miles from the Sun’s surface on Christmas Eve. That’s close enough to melt steel. Late on December 26, engineers finally got the signal they’d been holding their breath for: their spacecraft was still alive.
“Flying this close to the Sun is a historic moment in humanity’s first mission to a star,” Nicky Fox told reporters. As head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, she’s been pushing the boundaries of what we thought possible in solar research.
The probe didn’t get this close by accident. Since launching in 2018, it’s been playing a complex game of celestial pinball, using Venus’s gravity seven times to slingshot itself closer and closer to our star. Its last Venus flyby on November 6 finally put it in the perfect orbit – though “perfect” here means repeatedly plunging through the Sun’s outer atmosphere where temperatures top a million degrees Fahrenheit.
The crazy part? The instruments inside the probe stay about as cool as your living room, thanks to a carbon foam shield that takes the heat instead. While that shield bakes at 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, the sensitive equipment behind it keeps working.
John Wirzburger, who leads the engineering team at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, puts it bluntly: “It’s monumental to be able to get a spacecraft this close to the Sun.” His team built and operates the probe from their campus in Laurel, Maryland. “This is a challenge the space science community has wanted to tackle since 1958,” he adds, “and had spent decades advancing the technology to make it possible.”
The probe’s earlier passes have already blown up some of our theories about the Sun. Back in 2021, it discovered the outer edge of the Sun’s atmosphere isn’t smooth as everyone thought – it’s wrinkled with spikes and valleys. It also solved the mystery of weird zig-zag patterns in the solar wind, tracing them back to the Sun’s visible surface.
“We now understand the solar wind and its acceleration away from the Sun,” says Adam Szabo, who runs the mission from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He’s eager to see what secrets this even closer pass will reveal about how that acceleration works.
For now, all we know is the probe survived. The real data is still coming. But with two more ultra-close passes coming up on March 22 and June 19, 2025, solar scientists are about to get an unprecedented look at our star’s most closely guarded secrets.
Not bad for a Christmas Eve.