This probe is inside the sun’s atmosphere. After years of spiraling closer to our star, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe broke its own record by flying just 4.51 million miles from the sun’s surface – which sounds far, but it’s within the sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona. The goal is to study eruptions like solar wind, flares, and coronal mass ejections, all of which launch magnetized particles towards us on Earth.

Once the probe reaches its predetermined final orbit, the mission will be complete. But what happens to it then? We asked a NASA scientist on the project and he said that we can expect quite a number of additional passages after the final mission, but eventually we won’t be able to control the probe anymore and it will likely become part of the near-Sun dust environment.

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