NASA's man-made vehicle zooms past sun at record-breaking 585,000 kilometres per hour

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Flipboard
  • Email
  • WhatsApp
NASA's man-made vehicle zooms past sun at record-breaking 585,000 kilometres per hour (Image: Pixabay)
NASA's man-made vehicle zooms past sun at record-breaking 585,000 kilometres per hour (Image: Pixabay)

New Delhi : Records are meant to be broken and with advancement in technology new records become in no time. The Parker Solar Probe of NASA has broken its own record for the fastest vehicle humans ever built.

The space agency said that its probe zoom past the Sun at a record speed of more than 585,801 kilometres per hour (364,000 miles per hour) or roughly 101 miles per second. With such speed, the spacecraft can travel from New York to Los Angeles in just under 24 seconds, further it will cross the Atlantic and arrive in London in just over half a minute.

The primary goal of the spacecraft is to find details about mysterious corona found over the sun. The craft's principal research tasks on its most recent journey are to study the features of solar storms, which are streams of charged particles ejected from the sun's upper atmosphere, also known as the corona.

The Parker Solar Probe comes with a capability to resolve the riddle as to why our star's outer atmosphere is so much significantly warmer than its surface. The Parker Solar Probe approached the sun's surface at a distance of 5.3 million miles. This was the probe's tenth trip around the sun.

There is a belief that more closer you will get to the surface of the Sun more hotter it should get; but there is no significant proof to it.

The Parker Solar Probe will also try to find why there is so much dirt near the sun. Dust is detected by the plasma produced when tiny particles hit the craft.

Since we talked about the advancing technology earlier in the article, it must be noted that the Parker Solar Probe's records may be beaten sometime in the near future. Two more space missions of the probe are scheduled in August 2023 and November 2024. The Parker Solar Probe will pass the sun at a blazing 690,000 kilometres per hour (430,000 miles per hour) in December 2024. With such blazing speeds, the probe will be able to get closer to the Sun, coming within 4 miles.

"What's exciting about this is it's greatly improving our understanding of the innermost regions of our heliosphere, giving us insight into an environment that, until now, was a total mystery," remarked Nour Raouafi, a project scientist in Parker Solar Probe at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Laurel, Maryland.