NASA 8 June 2025 - 21 June 2025

The Sun is our life-giving star – a 4.6-billion-year-old solar inferno that governs Earth’s climate and space environment. Understanding the Sun is not only vital for fundamental science, but also for protecting modern technology and astronauts from space weather nasa.gov nasa.gov. Yet many solar mysteries endure, such as why the Sun’s outer atmosphere blazes hundreds of times hotter than its surface, or how the solar wind – a stream of charged particles flowing outward – is accelerated to high speeds. In the past, scientists could only observe the Sun from afar. Now, two bold spacecraft are “touching” the Sun up close: NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter. These missions are venturing closer to our star than ever before, braving intense heat and radiation to unlock the Sun’s deepest secrets science.nasa.gov esa.int. This report delves into these daring missions – their objectives, designs, key discoveries, and how together they are revolutionizing solar physics. Launched by NASA in August 2018, the Parker Solar Probe is humanity’s first mission to fly through the Sun’s corona – literally touching the Sun nasa.gov. It is named after solar physicist Eugene Parker, who first predicted the solar wind in 1958 cosmos.esa.int. Parker Solar