NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is still orbiting the sun and making history, and it’s preparing for another record-breaking approach this week. According to the space agency, at 6:53 a.m. ET on December 24, the spacecraft will be in its orbit just 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from the Sun’s surface. This will be the closest approach to the Sun that it – or any other probe – has ever made. The milestone marks the completion of Parker Solar Probe’s 22nd orbit around our star and the first of the final three planned flybys his mission. Launched in 2018, the spacecraft is expected to complete a total of 24 orbits.
“No man-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will actually be sending back data from unknown territory,” Nick Pinkine, operations manager for the Parker Solar Probe mission at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a statement on NASA blog. “We look forward to hearing from the spacecraft as it orbits the sun again.”
The Parker Solar Probe will be traveling at a speed of about 430,000 miles per hour at the time of its next flyby. It will ping the team on December 27 to confirm its health, when it is far enough from the sun to resume communications.
