NASA’s Park­er So­lar Probe has suc­cess­ful­ly made the clos­est ap­proach to the sun, the space agency con­firmed Fri­day.

Ear­li­er this week, the space­craft passed with­in a record-break­ing 3.8 mil­lion miles (6 mil­lion kilo­me­tres) of the scorch­ing star. NASA re­ceived an all-clear mes­sage from Park­er on Thurs­day night con­firm­ing it sur­vived the jour­ney.

Launched in 2018 to get a close-up look at the sun, Park­er has since flown straight through its crown­like out­er at­mos­phere, or coro­na. With its close brush com­plete, the craft is ex­pect­ed to cir­cle the sun at this dis­tance through at least Sep­tem­ber.

It’s the fastest space­craft built by hu­mans and hit 430,000 mph (690,000 kph) at clos­est ap­proach. It is out­fit­ted with a heat shield that can with­stand scorch­ing tem­per­a­tures up to 2,500 de­grees Fahren­heit (1,370 de­grees Cel­sius).

Sci­en­tists hope the da­ta from Park­er will help them bet­ter un­der­stand why the sun’s out­er at­mos­phere is hun­dreds of times hot­ter than its sur­face and what dri­ves the so­lar wind, the su­per­son­ic stream of charged par­ti­cles con­stant­ly blast­ing away from the sun.