"We are basically almost landing on a star," Parker project scientist Nour Raouafi told the BBC. "This will be a monumental achievement for all humanity. This is equivalent to the Moon landing of 1969."
The probe, which launched in 2018, has already made several close passes of our star. In 2021, NASA bragged that its probe had "touched" the Sun, coming within 8.1 million miles above the solar surface. Late last year, it made one of its closest approaches yet, per the BBC.
As for the possibility of "landing" on the Sun, needless to say, it's far from the experience of landing on a solid mass like Mars. The Sun is a spinning cloud of hydrogen and helium gas, compressed together by its own gravity.
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