Parker Solar Probe

The Parker Solar Probe is a NASA space probe 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 12 August 2018. It became the first NASA spacecraft named after a living person, honoring nonagenarian 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 18 May 2018. The card also contains photos of Parker and a copy of his 1958 scientific paper predicting important aspects of solar physics.

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