Parker Solar Probe Thriving Four Years after Launch

As it orbits the Sun, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe encounters some of the most challenging conditions ever faced by a spacecraft: temperatures up to nearly 1,500° Fahrenheit, space dust that could easily degrade materials and instruments, and intense light and high-speed particles escaping from our closest star. ☀️

Building a spacecraft to withstand these conditions for years was a monumental challenge. The mission team at APL had to prepare the spacecraft to operate in an environment that had never been explored before. Parker has weathered it all while flying approximately 2.7 billion miles — roughly the distance from the Sun to Neptune — and doing it faster than any mission before. By comparison, NASA’s New Horizons — the APL-led mission that captured the first images of Pluto — took 8 1/2 years to fly the same distance.

“We designed to worst-case assumptions for things like the thermal environment and the effects of solar radiation on the spacecraft,” said Jim Kinnison, the Parker Solar Probe mission systems engineer at APL. “We’re pleased that all the hard work during the design phase to define those worst-case assumptions has paid off.”