On Christmas Eve, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe made history by completing the closest-ever approach to the sun, hurtling just 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from the solar surface. Traveling at a blistering 430,000 mph (692,000 km/h), the spacecraft became the fastest human-made object ever recorded—capable, in theory, of reaching Tokyo from Washington, D.C. in under a minute.
NASA’s mission control team at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland confirmed the success of the maneuver after receiving a signal from the spacecraft just before midnight on Thursday. Due to the probe’s proximity to the sun, communication had gone dark during the flyby, with full data transmission not expected until early January.
