Parker Solar Probe

The Parker Solar Probe mission is revolutionizing our understanding of the Sun. The mission “touches the Sun,” flying directly through the solar corona, facing brutal heat and radiation conditions and providing unprecedented, close-up observations of the star we live with.

These observations are addressing unsolved science questions such as how the Sun’s corona is heated and how the solar wind is accelerated. It will also benefit humans on the ground by making critical contributions to our ability to forecast major space weather events that impact life and technology on Earth. Such information can not only shed light on how the Sun drives the space environment in our own solar system, but also provide insight into other stars throughout the universe.

To perform these unprecedented investigations, the spacecraft used seven Venus flybys over approximately six years to gradually shrink its orbit, coming as close as 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) to the Sun, about seven times closer than any spacecraft before it.

Designed, built, and operated at APL, Parker Solar Probe carries four instrument suites designed to study electric and magnetic fields, plasma, and energetic particles, as well as image the solar wind.

The spacecraft and instruments are protected from the Sun’s heat by a 4.5-inch-thick (11.43-centimeter-thick) carbon-composite shield, which will withstand temperatures of nearly 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit and radiation equivalent to about 500 times the Sun’s radiation here on Earth. A special cooling system allows the solar arrays to produce power under the intense thermal load from the Sun, and a fault-management system protects the spacecraft during the long periods of time when it can’t communicate with Earth.

In 2017, the spacecraft and mission were renamed after Eugene Parker, who in the 1950s proposed the concept of the solar wind. This was the first NASA mission to have been named for a living individual. Parker died in March 2022 at age 94.

Parker Solar Probe has already begun to revolutionize our understanding of the Sun. A deeper understanding of the nature of the solar corona and processes occurring between the Sun and the Earth will also benefit humans on the ground by potentially contributing to our ability to forecast space weather events that impact life and technology on Earth and human spaceflight operations.

Parker Solar Probe already holds the records for the closest approach to the Sun (4.5 million miles) and for being the fastest human-built object (traveling at more than 394,000 miles per hour).

Parker Solar Probe is operating normally, having recently begun its 22nd science-observation orbit around the Sun.