It is the only spacecraft to study all four of the solar system’s giant planets- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune at close range.
Voyager 2 is 11.5 billion miles from the Earth and, at that distance, light takes 17 hours to reach it or for messages from it to reach mission control on Earth.
Voyager gets its power from a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) which turns heat from the decay of radioactive material into electricity.
It officially entered ‘interstellar space’ in November 2018. It joined its twin—Voyager 1—as the only human-made object to enter the space between the stars.
This space between the stars is dominated by the plasma that was ejected by the death of nearby giant stars millions of years ago.
The sun sends out a constant flow of charged particles called the solar wind, which ultimately travels past all the planets to some three times the distance to Pluto before being impeded by the interstellar medium.
This forms a giant bubble around the sun and its planets, known as the heliosphere.
Parker Solar is NASA’s robotic spacecraft to probe the outer corona of the Sun. It is part of NASA’s Living with a Star Program
NASA renamed the spacecraft from the Solar Probe Plus to the Parker Solar Probe in honor of astrophysicist Eugene Parker. This was the first time NASA named a spacecraft for a living individual.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe lifted off on 12th August 2018 from a pad here at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, its powerful United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket carving an arc of orange flame into the predawn sky.
The Parker Solar Probe carries a lineup of instruments to study the Sun both remotely and in situ, or directly. Together, the data from these instruments should help scientists answer three foundational questions about our star.
