Why Parker?

The Probe is named after the eminent Physicist Eugene Parker (June 10, 1927 – March 15, 2022), who discovered what is now known as solar wind. He was a professor at the University of Chicago for most of his career. Parker was able to witness the launch of the Probe in his lifetime.

Mission Data

The Parker Solar Probe carries several instruments to measure the atmosphere of the Sun. The measurements include the Probe's position, the magnetic field, and the density, temperature, and speed of plasma protons. It takes about 6 months to transmit, validate, and publish the data. All the data is free and open to the public: a public good, like the Sun itself. This link takes you to the data portal for the Parker Solar Probe. You can download data in the .csv format from there, in daily or hourly frequencies.

For our composition, we used data from 2018/10/31 to 2024/10/27.

We scaled the data temporally so it starts 0.33 times slower than the actual data and ends 3.0 times faster than the actual data. We also accelerated the data so 6 years play in about 10 minutes.