It promises to be a remarkable moment in the history of space exploration.
A year from now, on 24 December, Nasa’s Parker Solar Probe will race past the Sun at the astonishing speed of 195 km/s, or 435,000 mph.
No human-made object will have moved so fast nor, indeed, got so close to our star - just 6.1 million km, or 3.8 million miles from the Sun’s “surface”.
“We are basically almost landing on a star,” said Parker project scientist Dr Nour Raouafi.
“This will be a monumental achievement for all humanity. This is equivalent to the Moon landing of 1969,” the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory scientist told BBC News.
This is really cool, but it feels kind of insulting to call this equivalent to landing people on the moon in 1969. To bring humans to the moon and back alive and healthy, with 1960s computer tech, seems a much more significant feat. Plus the huge risk that astronauts took, made very real by preceding and subsequent deaths and close-calls. Sounds like this will be an important accomplishment and undoubtedly technically difficult, and the speed record part is particularly cool. Howevert it’s ultimately still an unmanned probe, which seems incomparable to a manned mission imo.