NASA’s Parker Solar Probe reaches closest to the Sun than any spacecraft ever (video)

The $1.5 billion mission will take humanity closer to the Sun than ever before

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has clinched the record for closest approach to the Sun by a man-made object, the space agency confirmed Monday. According to NASA, the Parker Solar Probe passed the record of 26.55 million miles (42.73 million kilometers), set by the Helios 2 spacecraft in April 1976, at about 1:04 p.m. EDT (17:04 GMT) on Oct. 29, 2018. As the Inquisitr previously reported, up until now the record belonged to the German-American Helios 2 mission — which managed to come as close as 26.98 million miles (43.4 million kilometers) to our star on April 17, 1976. During the final orbit, scheduled for 2024, the Parker Solar Probe will travel through the sun’s fiery atmosphere — known as the solar corona — coming within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from the surface of the sun. “It’s been just 78 days since Parker Solar Probe launched, and we’ve now come closer to our star than any other spacecraft in history,” Project Manager Andy Driesman, from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said in a NASA news release. “It’s a proud moment for the team, though we remain focused on our first solar encounter, which begins on Oct. 31.”

As the Parker Solar Probe continues to fly in its solar orbit, it will periodically swing by Venus to use the planet’s gravity to gradually get closer to the Sun with a final close approach distance estimated to be about 3.83 million miles (6.24 million kilometers) by 2024, NASA said. Parker Solar Probe will begin its first solar encounter on Oct. 31, continuing to fly closer and closer to the Sun’s surface until it reaches its first perihelion — the point closest to the Sun — at about 10:28 p.m. EST on Nov. 5.
NASA's Parker Solar Probe spacecraft becomes the closest ever sent to the sun, by passing 42.7 million km (26.6 million miles) from the sun's surface. The previous record was set in 1976 by the Helios 2 spacecraft. Parker's elliptical orbit will eventually take it to within 6.1 million km (3.8 million miles) of the sun.