Nasa mission lines up to ‘touch the Sun’

BBC

By Johnathan Amos

December 29, 2023

It promises to be a remarkable moment in the history of space exploration.

A year from now, on 24 December, Nasa’s Parker Solar Probe will race past the Sun at the astonishing speed of 195 km/s, or 435,000 mph.

No human-made object will have moved so fast nor, indeed, got so close to our star – just 6.1 million km, or 3.8 million miles from the Sun’s “surface”.

“We are basically almost landing on a star,” said Parker project scientist Dr Nour Raouafi.

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