NASA's Parker Solar Probe was expected to make history on Tuesday by flying into the sun's outer atmosphere called the corona on a mission to help scientists learn more about Earth's closest star. “No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory,” Nick Pinkine, mission operations manager at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a NASA blog. Parker was on course to fly 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) from