On August 12, 2018, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe was launched with the mission of repeatedly probing and making observations of the outer corona of the Sun. On October 29, 2018, the spacecraft became the closest ever artificial object to the Sun. Its trajectory includes seven Venus flybys over nearly seven years to gradually shrink its elliptical orbit around the Sun. The spacecraft will undertake 24 orbits around the Sun. With this mission, scientists seeks to solve two long-standing puzzles; how the stream of particles flowing continuously from the sun, known as the solar wind, is accelerated to its tremendous velocities; and why the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, is so much hotter than its surface.
Parker Solar Probe will use seven Venus flybys over nearly seven years to gradually shrink its orbit around the Sun, coming as close as 3.83 million miles (and 6.16 million kilometers) to the Sun, well within the orbit of Mercury and about seven times closer than any spacecraft has come before.
Parker Solar Probe is a true mission of exploration; for example, the spacecraft will go close enough to the Sun to watch the solar wind speed up from subsonic to supersonic, and it will fly through the birthplace of the highest-energy solar particles.
Picture Credit : Google