Today, NASA's Parker Solar Probe will complete its seventh swing past Venus — the spacecraft's final maneuver around the amber planet — in a flyby that will nudge the probe on a trajectory that will take it within 3.8 million miles of the sun's surface. That will be the closest that any human-built object has come to our star.
"We are basically almost landing on a star," Nour Raouafi, an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and project scientist for the Parker Solar Probe mission, told BBC News earlier this year. "This will be a monumental achievement for all humanity. This is equivalent to the moon landing of 1969."
