Parker Solar Probe
- id: PRB-016
- launch_year: 2018
- launch_date: 2018-08-12
- operated_by: NASA
- visited: Venus, The Sun
- people: Eugene Parker
- status: operating
- confidence: believed-correct
- sources: NASA NSSDCA Master Catalog
Parker Solar Probe launched on 12 August 2018, built and operated for NASA by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. It is the first NASA mission named for a living person: physicist Eugene Parker, who predicted the solar wind in 1958, watched the launch at age 91.
The mission uses repeated gravity-assist flybys of Venus to shrink its orbit ever closer to the Sun. In 2021 it became the first spacecraft to fly through the solar corona — the Sun's outer atmosphere — and its closest passes, in late 2024, brought it within about six million kilometers of the solar surface at the highest speeds any human-made object has ever reached. Behind its carbon-composite heat shield, it continues to sample the corona and solar wind directly.