A normal car going 50 km/h (31 mi/h) would need 34 days to circle the Earth, which has a circumference of 40,075 km (24,901 mi). The fastest land speed record holder is the ThrustSSC, which back in 1997 achieved a land speed of about 1228 km/h (763 mi/h); ride that and it would take you about 33 hours to circle the globe back to where you started.
Hitch a ride on the Parker Solar Probe, however, and things start to zip by really, really fast. At its peak recorded speed, strap yourself to the probe, and have a spotter—hopefully a close friend, or a significant other—watch you from the ground. Your partner-in-speed would watch you leave, wait 4.1 seconds, then hear you zip past by all over again, as you had already circled the globe in the time it probably took them to look at their stopwatch and back at the sky again.
NASA reports on the ridiculous speed achieved by our premier solar probe, whose primary objective is to observe the outer surface of the Sun. At its peak, the solar probe approached within 8.5 million km (5.3 million mi) of the Sun, making it the closest satellite to pass by the Sun without disintegrating. What’s more astounding is the fact that it reached a truly neck-breaking speed of 586,864 km/h (363,660 mi/h), making it the fastest man-made object on record.
At the time of its blistering fly-by of the Sun, the probe is at the halfway point of its mission, with the probe passing directly through a solar corona in some three to four (3-4) years to its eventual demise. This current trajectory marks the probe’s 10th approach in a total of 24, which in itself is a part of a series of seven (7) fly-bys.
The probe is expected to beat its own speed record in its later fly-bys, and is expected to come within 6.9 million km (4.3 million mi) of our star; at that point, the Parker Solar Probe would have reached an even faster 690,000 km/h (430,000 mi/h).
The probe is expected to begin transmitting its data back to Earth on Christmas eve (December 24), and will end in January 2022.
(For more NASA missions to other worlds, check out the future “Lucy” mission to the Trojan asteroids near Jupiter, and the recently-launched “DART” mission on a collision course towards the asteroid Dimorphos.)
References
- Fia world land speed records. (2012, June 10). Federation Internationale de l’Automobile. https://www.fia.com/fia-world-land-speed-records
- Hatfield, M. (2021, November 24). Parker Solar Probe Completes a Record-Setting Swing by the Sun. NASA Parker Solar Probe. https://blogs.nasa.gov/parkersolarprobe/2021/11/24/parker-solar-probe-completes-a-record-setting-swing-by-the-sun/
- Kwon, K.-A., Shipley, R. J., Edirisinghe, M., Ezra, D. G., Rose, G., Best, S. M., & Cameron, R. E. (2013). High-speed camera characterization of voluntary eye blinking kinematics. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 10(85), 20130227. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2013.0227
- Szondy, D. (2021, November 28). Parker Solar Probe sets new distance and speed records on solar slingshot. New Atlas. https://newatlas.com/space/parker-solar-probe-distance-speed-records-sun-flyby/
