Featured Image Credit: NASA / JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
Topics: NASA, Science, Space, World News, Technology
Britt Jones
Topics: NASA, Science, Space, World News, Technology
The fastest object ever made has broken records in its long journey home.
We always think about things on Earth when we consider what’s the fastest man-made thing ever invented.
Like the bullet train.
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But that’s not the real fastest thing ever created, as that title is reserved for NASA’s creation.
Breaking records on September 21 2023, the uncrewed Parker Solar Probe traveled unthinkable lengths at a remarkable speed on its way past Venus.
It survived ‘uncharted territories’ as it racked up a speed of 394,736mph.
Can you even imagine traveling that fast? I can’t.
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The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 in a bid to get closer to the Sun and it was tasked with the mission of touching it.
But don’t be alarmed, it’s not actually touching it.
The mission was to fly through the Sun’s corona, the outer atmosphere which has temperatures of up to 1,800°F.
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The reason the probe was tasked to do this is to try to find out why the Sun’s corona gets heated to millions of degrees, as that is much hotter than its surface.
With the hopes that the information provided will help scientists to figure out more about solar wind and how its particles are accelerated to near-light speed when thrown into space, it could provide a lot of data that could advance space knowledge.
Anyway, the super probe ended up breaking the record for the closest pass to the Sun by a human-made spacecraft and boldly shared to engineers on Earth that it wasn’t destroyed after ‘touching the Sun’. That’s a flex.
As the fastest human-made object in the cosmos, it surely had some expectations to live up to.
Thankfully, it was fully prepared to take down any naysayers as it carried out its closest pass to the Sun on December 24.
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The probe passed just 3.8 million miles from the Sun’s surface at speeds of around 430,000 miles per hour.
Nick Pinkine, Parker Solar Probe mission operations manager at NASA’s Applied Physics Laboratory said: “No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory.”
However, considering it hadn’t communicated back to NASA since December 20th's ‘I’m doing good’ message, it must have been quite the surprise to get a random message four days later casually announcing that it broke a record when it touched the giant fire ball in the sky.
What makes it even more funny, is that NASA wasn’t supposed to hear from it until December 27, which means that it was the closest to the Sun, and also three days faster on the route than it should have been.
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Two days later on December 26, it again messaged to share that it was ‘in good health and operating normally.’
To touch the Sun, the probe had to pass Venus seven times in order to get a gravity assist to increase its speed.
It then orbited the Sun 21 times as it slowly crept closer and closer each time.
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It was on the 22nd pass that it got as close as it possibly could.
Now, NASA has plans to do the same thing again in March and June 2025.
Arik Posner, a Parker Solar Probe program scientist said in a statement on December 20: “This is one example of NASA’s bold missions, doing something that no one else has ever done before to answer longstanding questions about our universe.
"We can’t wait to receive that first status update from the spacecraft and start receiving the science data in the coming weeks."
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January 1 should prove to be a great feat when NASA is expected to receive a more detailed data account of what it found out.