Parker Solar Probe

The Parker Solar Probe (PSP, previously Solar Probe, Solar Probe Plus or Solar Probe+) is a NASA space probe launched in 2018 to make observations of the Sun's outer corona. It used repeated gravity assists from Venus to develop an eccentric orbit, approaching within 9.86 solar radii (6.9 million km or 4.3 million miles) from the center of the Sun. At its closest approach in 2024, its speed relative to the Sun was 690,000 km/h (430, 000 mph) or 191 km/s (118.7 mi/s), which is 0.064% the speed of light. It is the fastest object ever built on Earth. The project was announced in the fiscal 2009 budget year. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory designed and built the spacecraft, which was launched on August 12, 2018. It became the first NASA spacecraft named after a living person, honoring the physicist Eugene Newman Parker, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. On October 29, 2018, at about 18:04 UTC, the spacecraft became the closest ever artificial object to the Sun. The previous record, 42.73 million kilometers (26.55 million miles) from the Sun's surface, was set by the Helios 2 spacecraft in April 1976. At its perihelion on September 27, 2023, the PSP's closest approach was 7.26 million kilometers (4.51 million miles), reaching this distance again on March 29, 2024. On December 24, 2024, at 11:53 UTC, PSP made its closest approach to the Sun, coming

Observatory data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).