NASA Spacecraft ‘Touches Sun' For Final Time In Defining Moment For Humankind

The heavily armored Parker Solar Probe has traveled to within just 3.86 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun's surface — what NASA calls 'hyper close.' It's the third and final time it has performed the feat, following similar achievements on Dec. 24, 2024, and March 22, 2025.
Parker launched on Aug. 12, 2018, and has since conducted 23 perihelions — close passes — of the sun, getting to within 3.86 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) twice before today's repeat performnce.
For scale, that's four yards from the end zone if the distance between Earth and the sun was the length of an American football field, according to mission scientists.
During this final perihelion of the mission, the probe will be traveling at around 430,000 miles per hour (690,000 kilometers per hour). According to NASA, that's fast enough to get from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., in a single second.
Perihelion 24 also sees it forced to withstand temperatures of 1,600 to 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit (870 to 930 degrees Celsius). Its only armor against both temperature and extreme ultraviolet radiation is a carbon composite shield.
Parker is in a highly elliptical orbit, which takes 88 days but allows it to occasionally swoop particularly close to the sun.
One of the main objectives of the mission is to understand why the sun's corona, its outer atmosphere, is a million times hotter than the photosphere, its surface.
The corona is where the solar wind originates from, so solar physicists must understand it better if they are to forecast space weather more accurately. That's important because the state of the solar wind — a stream of charged particles interacting with the Earth's atmosphere — can damage satellites and harm astronauts, as well as cause Northern Lights.
The latter half of Parker's mission has coincided with the peak of Solar Cycle 25, the current 11-year-long cycle of the sun, during which our star experiences a waxing and waning of magnetic activity.
A study published on June 3 used data from Parker while flying close to the sun, reveal a new source for energetic particles in the solar corona. The mechanism, called magnetic reconnection, heats the solar atmosphere, accelerating solar wind particles. Magnetic reconnection — when magnetic field lines converge, break apart and reconnect in an explosive physical process — is responsible for powerful solar events, such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections.
'We've seen how magnetic reconnection behaves near Earth, but Parker has now shown how potent it is near the sun, where magnetic fields are significantly stronger,' said Dr. Mihir Desai, lead author and a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
Parker isn't going anywhere. Locked in the orbit of the sun, it will continue to loop around our star. However, it was gravity assists at Venus that gave the spacecraft enough momentum to get so close to the sun. No, it's within the orbit of Venus, that opportunity is lost, so it won't be able to reach any closer to the sun than it already has done.
According to Live Science, the spacecraft's thrusters will eventually run out of fuel, and it will burn up, though its heat shield may remain in orbit for thousands of years.

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HERTHENA-Lung02 was a study that evaluated HER3-DXd, which is an antibody-drug conjugate (ADC), in the second-line setting for patients with previously treated EGFR -sensitizing mutations. It was an open-label study where patients received either the HER3-DXd or the investigator's choice chemotherapy, and the primary endpoint was median progression-free survival. The results showed that the median progression-free survival for patients who received HER3-DXd was 5.8 months whereas the median for the chemotherapy arm was 5.4 months. Even though it was a statistically significant difference, it was not a very clinically meaningful difference, with a huge implication that 100% of the patients in this study had treatment-related adverse events and some patients experienced interstitial lung disease (ILD). All in all, taking these data into account, even though there's a huge need in the treatment landscape for second-line EGFR -mutant patients, I think this ADC did not really show a substantial enough clinically meaningful benefit and had a large amount of toxicity. Olazagasti: Not to say that this study didn't show any overall survival (OS) benefit. We're talking about a drug that's not really giving patients a longer life and is also giving many side effects, like you mentioned — a large amount of discontinuation due to ILD, and so much toxicity without that benefit there. I think we'll table that regimen for now. Do you agree? Velez: I agree. Ana I. Velázquez Mañana, MD, MSc: I agree. Clearly, it's disappointing to see the results of not beating chemotherapy in the second-line setting, but I do think that potentially there is a role in the third line or afterwards. We know that patients are going to be getting chemotherapy and amivantamab in the second-line setting. There is a need for further drugs and interventions in the third line if patients don't have other AGAs [actionable oncogenic alterations] or other drivers that we can use targeted therapies for. I am hesitant to give up completely on the drug. I do agree it's quite toxic and very disappointing to unfortunately see these results in the second line. Olazagasti: I agree. Moving on to the next study — Ana, do you want to talk to us about the SACHI study? Velazquez Mañana: The SACHI study was an open-label, randomized trial of savolitinib plus osimertinib vs platinum doublet chemotherapy in patients who, post EGFR TKI, had progressed in the second line and had a MET amplification. We know that MET amplifications are an extremely common mechanism of resistance to EGFR TKI-targeted therapies. 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Troubling Case Links Vaping to Aggressive Lung Cancer

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