NASA spacecraft attempts to make history with closest-ever approach to the sun

The Parker Solar Probe will plunge into the centre of our solar system in a bid to shed some more light on the sun, as ITV News' Fred Dimbleby reports

A NASA spacecraft is attempting to make history as it aims to fly closer to the sun than any object sent before.

The Parker Solar Probe will zoom by the sun on Tuesday during a record-breaking flyby, coming within 3.8 million miles of the solar surface.

The uncrewed spacecraft will fly at 430,000 miles per hour, which is fast enough to reach Tokyo from Washington, DC, in under a minute, according to NASA.

The speedy flyby will make the probe the fastest human-made object in history, the agency said.

The mission has been building up to this historic milestone since it launched in 2018 to get a close-up look at the sun.

Since then, it has flown straight through the sun's corona: the outer atmosphere visible during a total solar eclipse, where it sampled particles and our star's magnetic fields.

NASA scientists won't know how Parker fared until days after the flyby since the spacecraft will be out of communication range.

They won't know whether it has survived until it signals back to Earth.

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Parker planned to get more than seven times closer to the sun than previous spacecraft, hitting 430,000 mph at the closest approach. It's the fastest spacecraft ever built and is outfitted with a heat shield that can withstand scorching temperatures up to 1,371 degrees Celsius (2,500 degrees Fahrenheit).

It'll continue circling the sun at this distance until at least September.

“Parker Solar Probe is changing the field of heliophysics,” said Helene Winters, Parker Solar Probe’s project manager from Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, in a statement.

“After years of braving the heat and dust of the inner solar system, taking blasts of solar energy and radiation that no spacecraft has ever seen, Parker Solar Probe continues to thrive.”

Scientists hope to better understand why the corona is hundreds of times hotter than the sun’s surface and what drives the solar wind, the supersonic stream of charged particles constantly blasting away from the sun.

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