NASA “Dares to Touch” the Heart of the Solar System

NASA brings in Christmas Eve by flying closer to the sun than any human-made object ever has. On December 24 at 6:53 a.m. ET, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, a car-sized spacecraft, swooped in within 3.86 million miles of the sun’s surface on Tuesday morning at a blistering speed of 430,000 mph, according to NASA.

“If you can imagine, it’s like going 96% of the way there to the sun’s surface,” said Kelly Korreck, a program scientist in NASA’s heliophysics division. The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 to make a 7-year journey to explore the sun’s corona—the blistering outer atmosphere of our nearest star.

NASA says that its Christmas Eve historic dive into the sun’s outer atmosphere is a major step toward answering long-standing mysteries about our star, such as why the corona burns hundreds of times hotter than the sun’s surface.

“This is the birthplace of space weather,” Korreck stated. “Now Parker is living through it, and we’ll better understand how space weather forms and what it means for us on Earth.”

By directly sampling the sun’s volatile plasma and magnetic fields, NASA says the probe will help scientists predict solar storms more accurately—critical for protecting satellites, power grids, and even astronauts.

“Parker’s” latest flyby is the first of three final close approaches planned for the mission. NASA expects to confirm the spacecraft’s survival within days, with groundbreaking images of the sun’s surface to follow in January.