A while back, NASA's Parker Solar Probe became the first man-made object to "touch" the sun.
Now, the Parker Solar Probe is setting new records.
It is currently traveling at 394,736 miles per hour in orbit around the sun. That's traveling faster than anything else the human race has ever made.
We're talking about .0006 lightspeed.
And it's getting faster: The goal is to get the probe up to about 430,000 miles per hour by 2025.
If Elon Musk could get a ship going that fast, we could get to Mars in a little over three days (and I could make the drive out of Texas in like half that time).
But that's the rub, in order to get the probe moving that fast, NASA had to slingshot it around Neptune, six times, which is a little out of the way for a trip to Mars, much less a trip across Texas.
Here's everyone's favorite science-denying scientist, Neal DeGrasse Tyson, to explain the process.
As the probe enter the sun's corona, scientists expect to get so much new data about the sun from the probe that they'll be studying it for a century.
Who knows what all they'll discover?
But hopefully it will involve going faster!
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