The Parker Solar Probe is the fastest thing humans have ever built
Diving through the Sun's outer atmosphere, NASA's Parker Solar Probe hit speeds no human-made object has ever matched.
Going fast in space usually means falling toward something massive, and nothing nearby is more massive than the Sun. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe used that to its advantage.
On December 24, 2024, it swept just 3.8 million miles above the Sun’s surface, closer to a star than any spacecraft before it, and in doing so reached roughly 430,000 miles per hour — faster than any human-made object has ever moved. At that pace it could cross the United States in a few seconds.
The probe reached this point gradually, using seven flybys of Venus over six years to bend its orbit ever tighter around the Sun.
To survive, it hides behind a carbon-composite heat shield that keeps its instruments near room temperature while the Sun-facing side endures scorching heat. Far from being destroyed, the spacecraft phoned home a few days later with a simple beacon tone confirming it had come through intact, ready to measure the solar corona from inside it.
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