NASA Probe Ties Its Own Speed Record as the Fastest Human-Made Object Ever

If you could somehow hitch a ride on the NASA Parker Solar Probe, you could travel from Los Angeles to London in approximately 49 seconds. So it’s perhaps no surprise that the probe recently tied its own world record as the fastest thing human beings have ever made, with a clocked speed of 394,736 miles, or 635,266 kilometers, per hour. The June 29 record-tying solidifies the probe as the fastest object ever made by humans. 

The former record holder for fastest human-made object was also the Parker Solar Probe, when it clocked 364,660 miles per hour in November 2021. Before that? You guessed it, the Parker Solar Probe once again, when it was clocked at over 330,000 miles per hour in 2021. That particular trip was also noteworthy because it was the first time a human-made object touched the sun. 

The probe achieves its amazing speeds with a mixture of timing and precision. It orbits the sun and lines up with the orbit of Venus. It then uses Venus’ gravity as a sort of slingshot to launch itself back at the sun once again. This animation by researchers from the University of Michigan helps with visualization.

Each time the Parker Solar Probe circles the sun, it uses an array of sensors to measure various parts of the sun. Since the probe has to deal with the extreme temperatures of our nearest star, NASA saw to it that the probe was outfitted with a custom heat shield along with a cooling system to keep things from getting out of hand. 

The Parker Solar Probe is likely to break its own record again next year. At that point, it should be going in the neighborhood of 430,000 miles per hour. 

Just how fast is 394,736 miles per hour?

Compared with other things, the Parker Solar Probe simply flies. The max speed of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is 20,827 miles per hour. In 2021, the Tesla Model S Plaid went from zero to 60 mph in two seconds flat. In that same time frame, the probe traveling at its highest clocked speed would’ve gone a little over 219 miles. 

 It can fly around the Earth’s equator in a little less than 4 minutes. It’s also faster than anything orbiting Earth. For the sake of comparison, the International Space Station, which is being brought down in 2030, travels at 17,000 mph, which is leisurely by comparison.

All these human-made items still have a way to go before they can approach the speeds of the greater cosmos, though. The star S4714 zooms along at around 15,000 miles per second, or about 5.4 million miles per hour, thanks to its tight orbit around a black hole. 

Before the Parker Solar Probe, the fastest manmade objects were the Helios solar probes, which have been clocked as high as 157,000 mph. The Helios solar probes also were once the human-made objects that had traveled closest to the sun before the Parker Solar Probe. It seems likely that if Parker ever loses its speed record, it’ll probably be to another, even faster solar probe.