As the Parker Solar Probe prepares for a record-breaking flyby of our Sun, NASA experts have revealed the secrets of the historic mission.

The Parker Solar Probe will be closer to our sun than any other man-made object before, coming within 3.86 million miles of the star on December 24.

In a live broadcast at 5:00 p.m. ET, scientists involved with the Parker Solar Probe mission discussed the upcoming close approach to our star and noted that the mission is an amazing achievement that could reveal the mysteries of the solar body.

[Parker Solar Probe] is the perfect exploratory mission … any observation we make is a potential discovery,” Nour Rawafi, astrophysicist and project scientist for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission, said in a live broadcast.

The Parker Solar Probe was launched on August 12, 2018 and hopes to study the Sun’s corona. On its way to this super-tight orbit around the Sun, the probe swung extremely close to Venus on Nov. 6, coming within 233 miles of the planet’s surface.

The probe is now headed for a tight orbit around the Sun. The probe will break its own previous records for closest approach by a spacecraft to our star, which it set at 4.51 million miles in 2023 and previously at 26.55 million miles in 2018. As the Parker Solar Probe draws ever closer, the closest spacecraft ship to the Sun was the Helios 2 spacecraft, which in 1976 came within about 27 million miles of the Sun.

If the distance between the Earth and the Sun were the length of a football field, Parker would be about four yards from the end zone,” explained Joy Ng, head of multimedia at NASA, during the live broadcast.

In 2021, Parker flew through the Sun’s corona, marking the first time in history that a spacecraft has come into contact with the Sun’s atmosphere.

“On a ‘touch the sun’ mission, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe became the first spacecraft to fly through the corona – the Sun’s upper atmosphere – in 2021,” NASA says on its website.

The probe used Venus as a gravitational assist to propel it closer to the Sun. As it approached the planet, the gravitational force accelerated the spacecraft, increasing its speed, and as it left the planet, the probe “borrowed” some of the planet’s orbital momentum.

The probe is currently flying toward the Sun at about 130,000 mph, according to NASA. Once at its closest orbit on Christmas Day, Parker is expected to travel at approximately 430,000 miles per hour.

“That’s fast enough to get from Philadelphia to Washington, DC, in one second. This makes Parker the fastest man-made object in history and will be an amazing achievement,” Ng said.

The mission will hopefully allow scientists to study the heating of the solar corona, as well as deepen our understanding of the origin and acceleration of the solar wind and the structure and dynamics of the solar magnetic fields.

“In this hyper-tightness mode, Parker will cut through clouds of plasma that are still associated with the sun. It is close enough to pass through the interior of a solar flare, like a surfer diving under a crashing ocean wave,” NASA said.

The probe is equipped with a 4.5-inch-thick heat shield made of carbon composite material that can withstand temperatures of up to 2,500 F while keeping the spacecraft’s instruments at a comfortable temperature despite its proximity to our rotating star.