Today, NASA's Parker Solar Probe will complete its seventh swing past Venus — the spacecraft's final maneuver around the amber planet — in a flyby that will nudge the probe on a trajectory that will take it within 3.8 million miles of the sun's surface. That will be the closest that any human-built object has come to our star.

The probe will orbit the sun "close enough to pass inside a solar eruption, like a surfer diving under a crashing ocean wave," NASA said.