Your random space fact for the week comes from CosmoQuest community member Uncwilly: During its closest approach to the Sun, the Parker Solar Probe will be traveling so fast that it could go from the Earth to the Moon in 50 minutes. New Horizons took 9 hours to cover the same distance after its launch.

Now to be fair to New Horizons, this zippy explorer did get sped up on its way to Pluto, in particular by a gravitational assist from Jupiter that helped it exceed 52,000 mph. Still, Parker Solar Probe is going closer to 300,000 miles per hour!

This tremendous velocity is required to allow the mission to fly past the Sun without the Sun’s gravity having a chance to pull it in. According to Jonathan McDowell, Parker’s most recent closest approach to the Sun, or perihelion, brought it within 8,400,000 miles of the Sun. This is the closest any man-made object has passed to the Sun.

This is not the closest or the fastest that Parker will go, however. In 2024 it will get within 3.8 million miles of the Sun while traveling at 430 some odd thousand miles per hour.

More Information

Scientific American blog

NASA press release