PARKER SOLAR PROBE

Mission

Kind: Heliophysics

State: Operational

Place: Sun

Operator: NASA / Applied Physics Laboratory

Instruments: 1) Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons Investigation, 2) Solar Probe Cup, 3) Solar Probe Analyzers, 4) Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe, 5) Electromagnetic Fields Investigation, 6) Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun Energetic Particle Instruments,

Date

Start:

Duration: 7 years (planned)Elapsed: 2 years, 2 months and 28 days

Mission Ending

"Life's like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending." - Jim Henson

Rocket

Rocket: Delta IV Heavy / Star-48BV

Kind: NASA / Applied Physics Laboratory

Manufacturer: Applied Physics Laboratory

Mass: 685 kg (1,510 lb)

Launch Site: Cape Canaveral, SLC-37

Flyby

"Requesting permission for flyby." Maverick - Top Gun

Orbit

Reference System: Heliocentric orbit

Lander

"The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing." - Paul Theroux

The Parker Solar Probe (abbreviated PSP, previously Solar Probe, Solar Probe Plus or Solar Probe+) is a NASA Space Probe launched in 2018 with the mission of making observations of the outer corona of the Sun. It will approach to within 9.86 solar radii (6.9 million km or 4.3 million miles) from the center of the Sun, and by 2025 will travel, at closest approach, as fast as 690,000 km/h (430,000 mph), or 0.064% the speed of light. The project was announced in the fiscal 2009 budget year. The cost of the project is US$1.5 billion. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory designed and built the spacecraft, which was launched on 12 August 2018. It became the first NASA spacecraft named after a living person, honoring physicist Eugene Newman Parker, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. A memory card containing the names of over 1.1 million people was mounted on a plaque and installed below the spacecraft's high-gain antenna on 18 May 2018. The card also contains photos of Parker and a copy of his 1958 scientific paper predicting important aspects of solar physics. On 29 October 2018, at about 18:04 UTC, the spacecraft became the closest ever artificial object to the Sun. The previous record, 42.73 million kilometres (26.55×10^6 mi) from the Sun's surface, was set by the Helios 2 spacecraft in April 1976. As of its perihelion on 27 September 2020, the Parker Solar Probe's closest approach is 13.5 million kilometres (8.4×10^6 mi). This will be surpassed after each successive flyby of Venus.