Spacecraft
Parker Solar Probe
Flies closer to the Sun than anything ever has - inside ten solar radii, through the corona itself - behind a carbon shield that reaches 1,400 °C while the instruments behind it stay at room temperature. It is there to find out why the corona is hundreds of times hotter than the surface below it and what accelerates the solar wind, and it lowers its approach with repeated Venus flybys.
- Agency
- NASA
- Launched
- 2018-08-12 - still working
Path
A loop round the Sun that is lowered a step at a time. Each Venus flyby drops the near end - now inside ten solar radii - while the far end stays out by Venus, so it comes round every 88 days and spends only hours in the corona.
Along the way
- First Venus flyby, the first of seven that lower the loop
- First perihelion, already closer to the Sun than anything had been
- Flew inside the corona - into the Sun's atmosphere
- Closest approach: 6.1 million km from the surface, at 690,000 km/h
Everything the map shows is worked out in your browser from published orbital data - nothing on it is a stored picture of where things were.