A NASA spacecraft has touched the surface of the sun for the first time in history, marking a new milestone for space science.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe flew through the sun's upper atmosphere and collected data on magnetic fields and particles, the agency announced in a Tuesday press release.

The milestone is comparable to the moment Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, according to NASA.

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"Just as landing on the Moon allowed scientists to understand how it was formed, touching the very stuff the Sun is made of will help scientists uncover critical information about our closest star and its influence on the solar system," the release read.

The sun does not have a solid surface, per se, but rather a superheated atmosphere composed of solar material held together by magnetic forces and gravity, NASA explained.


Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., said the probe flying through the 2 million degrees Fahrenheit environment is "a truly remarkable feat."

"Not only does this milestone provide us with deeper insights into our Sun's evolution and [its] impacts on our solar system, but everything we learn about our own star also teaches us more about stars in the rest of the universe," he said.

The Parker probe was launched in 2018, and flybys of the sun will continue.

"Flying so close to the Sun, Parker Solar Probe now senses conditions in the magnetically dominated layer of the solar atmosphere — the corona — that we never could before," Nour Raouafi, the Parker project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said.

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"We see evidence of being in the corona in magnetic field data, solar wind data, and visually in images," Raouafi added. "We can actually see the spacecraft flying through coronal structures that can be observed during a total solar eclipse."