Looking Sideways from the Parker Solar Probe

What’s happening near the Sun? To help find out, NASA launched the robotic Parker Solar Probe (Spacecraft) to investigate regions closer to the Sun than ever before. The Parker Solar Probe’s looping orbit brings it nearer to the Sun each time around — every few months.

The featured time-lapse video shows the view looking sideways from behind Parker Solar Probe’s Sun shield during its 16th approach to the Sun last year — from well within the orbit of Mercury. The Parker Solar Probe’s Wide Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) cameras took the images over eleven days, but they are digitally compressed here into about one minute video.

The waving of the solar corona is visible, as is a coronal mass ejection, with stars, planets, and even the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy streaming by in the background as the Parker Solar Probe orbits the Sun.

Parker Solar Probe has found the solar neighborhood to be surprisingly complex and to include switchbacks — times when the Sun’s magnetic field briefly reverses itself.