Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter Trajectories 

NASA's Parker Solar Probe to touch the Sun launched Sunday, August 12, 2018, from Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Parker Solar Probe is humanity’s first-ever mission into a part of the Sun’s atmosphere called the corona. Here it will directly explore solar processes that are key to understanding and forecasting space weather events that can impact life on Earth. Planned for launch in 2020, the Solar Orbiter mission will also study the Sun. The joint ESA/NASA collaboration will address a central question of Heliophysics: How does the sun create and control the giant bubble of magnetic fields around it, the heliosphere? 

This visualization shows the trajectories of both Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter. It opens near Earth for the launch of the Parker Solar Probe and then the Solar Orbiter in 2020. After that, the camera moves in a slow drift around the Sun as the orbits evolve. Parker Solar Probe moves in a highly-elliptical orbit, using gravity-assists from Venus to move the orbit perihelion closer to the Sun with each pass. The goal is to get the spacecraft to fly through the corona at a distance of 9.5 solar radii. Primary science operations are conducted when the spacecraft is within 0.25 astronomical units (AUs) from the Sun, so that portion of the orbit is colored red. The nominal end of mission for Parker Solar Probe is 2025, so the orbit fades away after that year. Solar Orbiter uses a series of Earth and Venus gravity assists to move its orbit perihelion to a distance inside the orbit of Mercury for detailed solar monitoring. The primary science operations for Solar Orbiter are conducted when the spacecraft is within 0.5 AUs from the Sun. 


For more information, visit 
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4653 

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