🛰️ Mission
Parker Solar Probe
The spacecraft that flew into the Sun’s atmosphere.
- Launched
- 12 August 2018, 8 years ago
- Working for
- 8 years so far
- Built by
- NASA
- Where it is
- Looping closer to the Sun than any craft has been
- Best known for
- Flew through the Sun’s corona in 2021 — the first time anything had touched a star
Did you know?
- A carbon shield 11.4 cm thick keeps it near room temperature while its front face reaches about 1,400 °C.
- It is the fastest object humans have built, passing 690,000 km/h at its closest approach.
Where it went
The Sun
Our star, an ordinary one that keeps everything here alive.
More NASA photos of Parker Solar ProbeStraight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of missions
Hubble Space Telescope
Thirty-six years above the weather, and still working.
James Webb Space Telescope
A golden mirror that sees the first galaxies in infrared.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The telescope that shows what is hot and violent.
Spitzer Space Telescope
Sixteen years of infrared, through dust that hides everything else.
Kepler
Stared at one patch of sky and found thousands of planets.
TESS
Kepler’s successor, watching the whole sky for planets.