sun

Achieving the feat that eluded Icarus, on Christmas Eve day NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flew close enough to “touch” the Sun, emerging unscathed on the other side.Breaking its previous record by passing just 3.8 million miles above the Sun’s surface, this “fearless” explorer dared to go where even the gods have been afraid to go. The Parker Solar Probe passed through the Sun’s outer atmosphere at a mind-boggling 430,000 miles per hour (692,000 kilometers per hour), a speed that was necessary to avoid being burned to a crisp. Even for the heavily heat-shielded Parker probe, pausing to look around and take a few minutes of video could have been disastrous. The scientists from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory who