NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has repeated its record-smashing performance of December 2024, swooping down within a scorching 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles) of the Sun’s surface.
That distance marks the closest any human-made object has ever been to the Sun, with the probe cruising at a breakneck speed of 192 kilometers per second – the fastest speed ever recorded by a human-made object.
Both records were originally set by the probe on 24 December 2024. Now, both have been successfully repeated on 22 March 2025, bringing the probe deep into the Sun’s atmosphere, which extends more than 8.3 million kilometers from its visible surface.
Icarus, eat your heart out.
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What makes these daring feats of Sun ‘chicken‘ even more amazing is that the solar atmosphere is so much hotter than the surface, reaching temperatures of millions of degrees. This means that Parker’s specially designed heat shield has protected it not once, but twice now from these searing temperatures.
“The spacecraft checked in on Tuesday [March 25] with mission operators at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland – where the spacecraft was also designed and built – with a beacon tone indicating it was in good health and all systems were operating normally,” NASA’s Sarah Frazier wrote in a mission update.
Parker launched in 2018 on a mission that involves repeatedly looping around the Sun on closer and closer orbits to study the star’s atmosphere, its crazy particle winds, and its wild magnetic fields – all of which are pieces of the solar puzzle we still don’t fully understand.
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The close approach of 22 March is the 23rd that the spacecraft has conducted overall, and second of five that the spacecraft is planned to make at the 6.1 million kilometer distance.
The third will take place on June 19. If the spacecraft survives, and has enough fuel, it will go on to conduct two more, on September 15 and December 12.
It’s unlikely that Parker’s mission will continue much past that date, though.
“One day, we will run out of fuel for the rocket thrusters that help us control trajectory and the solar probe will no longer be able to compensate for the pressure of the sunlight. The Sun will flip us around and the entire backside of the spacecraft should be incinerated in seconds,” explained astrophysicist and Parker principal investigator Justin Kasper of the University of Michigan in 2018.
“The carbon heat shield, the Faraday cup and some other parts should be able to survive those high temperatures. So what you’ll basically have is a sort of molten blob that will be in a ten-solar-radii orbit – for the next billion years or so.”
After that, we suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.
