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.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe should have completed its seventh swing past Venus on Nov. 6 — the spacecraft's final maneuver around the amber planet — in a flyby that nudged the probe onto 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.