Short answers, pulled from the story.
On the 24th of December 2024, the Parker Solar Probe came within 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles) of the Sun's surface, the closest any human-made object has ever approached. Its perihelion distance at that final closest approach was 9.86 solar radii from the Sun's center.
At its closest approach in December 2024, the Parker Solar Probe reached 430,000 miles per hour (191 km/s), which is 0.064 percent of the speed of light. This made it the fastest human-made object ever built, nearly three times faster than the previous record holder, Helios-2.
The spacecraft is named after Eugene Newman Parker, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, who mathematically predicted the existence of solar wind and proposed nanoflares as an explanation for coronal heating. It became the first NASA spacecraft named after a living person when it was renamed in May 2017.
The Parker Solar Probe launched on the 12th of August 2018 at 07:31 UTC on a Delta IV Heavy launch vehicle from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which designed and built the spacecraft.
The probe found evidence that Alfven waves are leading candidates for explaining why the solar corona is so much hotter than the Sun's surface. It detected approximately a thousand rogue magnetic waves capable of boosting solar wind speeds by up to 300,000 miles per hour, and in April 2021 it became the first spacecraft to cross the Alfven surface and enter the solar corona directly.
A hexagonal heat shield made of reinforced carbon-carbon composite panels around a carbon foam core, 2.3 meters in diameter and 11.4 centimeters thick, keeps the spacecraft's instruments at 85 degrees Fahrenheit while external temperatures reach about 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The spacecraft also uses four light sensors and reaction wheels to autonomously reposition itself if the shield ever drifts out of alignment.