A fortified NASA spacecraft has reached nearly 400,000 mph — again.
That’s the fastest a human-built machine has ever flown. And it will keep picking up speed.
The U.S. space agency recently announced its Parker Solar Probe — the first mission to fly through the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona — matched its own speed record of 394,736 mph (635,266 kilometers per hour) during its 20th close solar approach on June 29.
Objects often accrue speed when they pass by gravitationally-powerful objects, like the sun. And in the emptiness of space, little can stop this craft from continually going faster.
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“Once it’s going, it’s going,” Nour Raouafi, an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and project scientist for the mission, previously told Mashable.
NASA scientist viewed first Voyager images. What he saw gave him chills.
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