page_title: Parker Solar Probe
section_title: Science goals
hierarchical_section_title: Parker Solar Probe / Science goals
caption_attribution_description: English: Compared to the view from Earth, (roughly half a degree) the Sun would occupy almost 14 degrees of the sky as seen from the probe.
context_page_description: The Parker Solar Probe is a NASA robotic spacecraft launched in 2018 with the mission of making observations of the outer corona of the Sun. It will approach to within 9.86 solar radii from the center of the Sun, and by 2025 will travel, at closest approach, as fast as 690,000 km/h, or 0.064% the speed of light.
  The project was announced in the fiscal 2009 budget year. The cost of the project is US$1.5 billion. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory designed and built the spacecraft, which was launched on August 12, 2018. It became the first NASA spacecraft named after a living person, honoring physicist Eugene Newman Parker, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago.
  A memory card containing the names of over 1.1 million people was mounted on a plaque and installed below the spacecraft's high-gain antenna on May 18, 2018. The card also contains photos of Parker and a copy of his 1958 scientific paper predicting important aspects of solar physics.
  On October 29, 2018, at about 18:04 UTC, the spacecraft became the closest ever artificial object to the Sun.
context_section_description: The goals of the mission are:
  Trace the flow of energy that heats the corona and accelerates the solar wind
  Determine the structure and dynamics of the magnetic fields at the sources of solar wind
  Determine what mechanisms accelerate and transport energetic particles
caption: An apparent size of the Sun as seen from Parker Solar Probe at perihelion compared to its apparent size seen from Earth.
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