NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe on an unprecedented
mission to study the Sun up close in 2018. Now four years after launch, the mission has
made inroads towards achieving its goals. As Parker Solar Probe continues its
mission, it continues to break records and capture first-of-its-kind
measurements of the Sun.

Scientific goals:

To trace the flow of energy that heats the Sun’s outer
atmosphere.

To shed light on the sources of the solar wind, the constant
flow of solar material escaping from the Sun.

To explore how solar energetic particles – which can make the
93-million mile (150 million kilometres) journey to Earth in under an hour –
are transported and accelerated.

This is the first NASA mission launched in the name of a
living person.

NASA announced the mission to honour Eugene Parker, an
eminent physicist who first predicted the solar wind, in May 2017. It had
renamed the Solar Probe Plus mission to Parker Solar Probe. Parker witnessed
the spacecraft’s launch in person and the discoveries made in the mission’s few
years. He passed away on March 15, 2022, at age 94.

The mission was originally planned in 1958, but it took
60 years to develop the technology to realise the dream. Designed and built at
the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, Parker Solar
Probe carries a heat shield, autonomous onboard “smarts” to keep the spacecraft
facing the Sun, and an efficient cooling system.

In December 2021, NASA announced that Parker Solar Probe had
achieved its cornerstone objective: making the first measurements from within
the atmosphere of a star.

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