Humans May Have Arrived on the Sun's '4-Yard Line'

Confirmation awaits, but NASA scientists appear to have pulled off a remarkable Christmas Eve voyage on two fronts:

• The sun: The space agency's Parker Solar Probe by now should have wrapped up a flight to within 3.8 million miles of the sun, the closest any craft has ever come. For context, if the Earth and sun were at opposite ends of a football field, the solar probe "would be on the 4-yard line," NASA's Joe Westlake told the AP.

• The speed: During the flyby, the probe would have been traveling at a hard-to-fathom 430,000 miles per hour—"the fastest object ever made by humans," per the New York Times.
• Confirmation: The record-breaking pass happened at 6:53am ET if all went well, per Space.com. However, NASA won't get its first proof until Friday.
• The mission: Parker launched in 2018 and has made 21 previous solar flybys, but Tuesday's breaks the previous record by hundreds of thousands of miles and ventures into a solar region never before explored. After Tuesday, it will make two more flybys before the mission is complete, the last in June. "It's a voyage of discovery," says NASA's Nicky Fox. "We really are going into the unknown. Nothing has flown through the atmosphere of a star, and no other mission will for a long time."

(More NASA stories.)