Built by the John’s Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, and launched from Cape Canaveral on this day in 2008, the Parker Solar Probe is a NASA mission to study the outermost layer of the Sun’s atmosphere, the corona.
The probe is the first from NASA to be named after a living person, the solar physicist Eugene Newman Parker, the man who came up with the name solar wind, for the stream of particles coming from the Sun’s corona. Unfortunately, Professor Parker died earlier this year, on March 15, 2022.
Due to the nature of the target body (the Sun) the Parker probe needed to be particularly heat resistant. As a result, it travels with a large, thick, hexagonal heat shield facing towards the Sun, but this is okay, because flying through the corona means it doesn’t need to peep out from behind the shield; the area of interest is all around it.
According to the NASA website, the heat shield is so effective that even though the front of the shield will reach up to 2,500 F (1,377 C) the instruments will remain near room temperature.
Earlier this year, the NASA Parker blog reported the closest ever pass of the Sun, at within 5.3 million miles. At the time, Parker ws travelling fast enough to get from London to L.A. in under a minute. This was Parker’s 12th perihelion (closest approach), suggesting the geat shield is still doing its job.
It's All Going On Up There 