United States: On Christmas Eve, NASA’s spacecraft made history by getting closer to the Sun than any other human-made object which is somehow reaching just 3.86 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from its surface. The spacecraft is basically no bigger than a small car, also became the fastest object ever made by humans.
Monumental Feat
This monumental feat of exploration occurred at 11:05:30 GMT (6:53 a.m. EST) on Tuesday, Dec. 24 as Parker conducted a record breaking, tight flyby of the sun at four times closer than the previous ion at 3.86 million miles (6.1 million km from the sun). It was its 22nd close approach to the sun.
As reported by the CBS news, this monumental feat of exploration occurred at 11:06:53 Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday 24 December as Parker moved to 3.86 million miles or 6.1 million kilometers from the solar surface by performing a very close flyby. It was its 22nd close approach to the sun.
At 96% the distance between the sun and the earth, almost twice as close as Mercury, and at about 39% of the Sun-Earth distance, it is the closest any man-made object has got to the sun.
For Dr. Nour Raouafi the project’s scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, this mission’s importance can be compared to the Apollo 11 lunar landing in 1969.
‘With BICEP2, it’s the moment we have been waiting for nearly 60 years,’ he told a media roundtable at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting on December 10, 2024. “In 1969 we got the ability to take people into space. On the “Twenty-Fourth of December”, we greet a star — our star.”
‘Hyper-Close’
It will orbit in what NASA has termed hyper-close regime, slurping plasmas still tethered to the Sun, or navigating inside a solar coronal mass ejection, akin to one surfer going under a breaking wave.
The heat that Parker will be subjected to when as is its closest to the sun was “nearly 500 times the hottest summer day we can witness on Earth,” said Raouafi.