I noticed a little story on the interwebs the other day about the NASA Parker probe which is the one visiting the Sun at the moment, it recently flew 5 million miles above the surface of our local Star, close enough to "touch" her atmosphere or corona, a first for any craft of ours. It wasn't this fact that caught my eye though. In order to not get fried the little craft has to be travelling pretty swiftly and recently broke the record for the fastest man made object ever as it swung through the huge gravitational pull of the Sun at 587,000 km per hour or ~100 miles per second. It sounds like an incredible speed but at the scale of the universe it's still only 0.064% of the speed of light and so it's worth remembering that even if it could keep going at that rate it would still take around 7,000 years to reach our next nearest Star! Still, London to New York in 35 seconds is pretty impressive!
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