NASA’s fastest spacecraft will spend 6 years slowing down

NASA's new solar probe will touch the Sun, but getting there will be difficult. The Parker Solar Probe launches this week and will spend years flying through space. Eventually, the spacecraft will get within 4 million miles of the Sun, close enough to collect data from its corona. The solar probe is the fastest machine ever built, and requires an extremely sophisticated trajectory to reach the center of our solar system. The Parker Solar Probe will reach its final orbit in 2025. An earlier version of this video incorrectly identified the Parker Solar Probe's mission design lead; we apologize for the error. SUBSCRIBE: https://goo.gl/kdDpXu FOLLOW QUARTZ: Facebook: https://goo.gl/DsmLvx Twitter: https://goo.gl/rY7pSX Check out the rest of our videos: https://goo.gl/A8gZvx Quartz is a digitally native news outlet dedicated to telling stories at the intersection of the important and the interesting. Visit us at https://qz.com/ to read more.