NASA is constantly making incredible discoveries and accomplishing amazing things, sometimes without it even being their main intent.
For example, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has traveled millions of miles, flown closer to the sun than any other object, and much more.
What it might end up being most famous for, however, is that it is now confirmed to be the fastest manmade object ever.
While flying by the sun for the 17th time, it reached an astounding 635,266 kilometers (394,736 miles) per hour. It needs to go so fast because it is passing by the sun to gather data. Needless to say, the sun is extremely hot and even this craft that was designed specifically to withstand high temperatures can’t stay in them too long.
While performing a flyby on the sun, this probe is passing through its upper atmosphere, known as the corona. The sun is so large, however, its upper atmosphere is still pretty far from its surface. The probe is 6.5 million kilometers (4 million miles) above the surface of the sun while gathering information.
Traveling at high speeds helps to keep the probe safe. It reaches these speeds largely by using the sun’s massive gravity. The probe picks up speed while traveling toward the sun, and then again on the other side of its orbit, it uses the planet Venus to help maneuver back toward the sun and pick up more speed.
The probe itself has a solar-powered propulsion system that is used to make small adjustments to its path, but that does little to impact its speed.
To give some context to just how fast this probe travels, it would take it just 22 seconds to travel from New York City to Los Angeles, or just 36 minutes to go from the Earth to the Moon.
You can learn more about the mission of this probe and where it is traveling in this video:
This probe gives new meaning to speeding.
I don’t think they’ll even show up on police radar, tbh.
If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.