In less than two weeks, a spacecraft will pass through the atmosphere of our nearest star as part of its mission to “touch” the sun.

“On Christmas Eve of this year, the Parker Solar Probe will be the closest human-made object ever to a star,” Nour Rawafi at Johns Hopkins University said at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington DC on 10 December. “We are at the moment we’ve been waiting for for nearly 60 years.”