Humanity’s first visit to a star began this weekend

On Sunday, NASA launched its historic Parker Solar Probe at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Sunday. – an unmanned machine about the size of a small car will pass the sun 24 times over the next seven years, moving up to 430,000 miles per hour. Not only would that make it the fastest-moving manmade object in history, according to NASA, but it would also be a space device’s closest journey to the sun yet. “The launch energy to reach the Sun is 55 times that required to get to Mars, and two times that needed to get to Pluto,” Yanping Guo of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, who designed the mission trajectory, said in a statement. “During summer, Earth and the other planets in our solar system are in the most favorable alignment to allow us to get close to the Sun.”

The probe won’t exactly touch the sun or its 900,00 degree to 2 million degrees aura called the solar corona, even despite all the revolutionary thermal engineering, it will only get as close as 3.8 million miles away from the sun, given the central star’s intense heat, and that’s only so long as everything goes right. But the aim of the Parker Solr Probe mission is to hopefully help space scientists understand why the solar corona is so impossibly hot, along with what causes supersonic solar wind and other natural mysteries. The probe will orbit within 3.9 million miles of the sun’s surface in 2024, closer to the star than Mercury. Although that sounds far, researchers equate this to the probe sitting on the 4-yard line of a football field and the sun being the end zone.

The Parker Solar Probe’s launch marked a special milestone for one solar scientist – Eugene Parker. After all, the spacecraft is named in his honor. Sixty years ago, it was Parker who first proposed that the sun sent a stream of solar wind and it is NASA’s first ever named after a living person.