juliensimon/parker-solar-probe-encounters
Parker Solar Probe Encounter Timeline Credit: NASA/SDO Part of a dataset collection on Hugging Face. Dataset description Complete mission timeline for NASA's Parker Solar Probe — the first spacecraft to "touch" the Sun's corona and the fastest human-made object ever built. Compiled from JHU APL mission documents and the Fox et al. 2016 mission design paper (Space Sci. Rev. 204), with perihelion epochs cross-checked against JPL Horizons (object id -96).… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/parker-solar-probe-encounters.
Parker Solar Probe Encounter Timeline
<div align="center"> <img src="banner.jpg" alt="The Sun captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory — Parker Solar Probe's target" width="400"> <p><em>Credit: NASA/SDO</em></p> </div>
Part of a [dataset collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/juliensimon/space-weather-datasets-69c24cae98f1666f2101ca70) on Hugging Face.
Dataset description
Complete mission timeline for NASA's Parker Solar Probe — the first spacecraft to "touch" the Sun's corona and the fastest human-made object ever built. Compiled from JHU APL mission documents and the Fox et al. 2016 mission design paper (Space Sci. Rev. 204), with perihelion epochs cross-checked against JPL Horizons (object id -96).
The dataset covers all 24 nominal-mission perihelion encounters from E1 (November 6 2018, 35.66 Rsun) through E24 (June 19 2025, 9.86 Rsun), interleaved with the 7 Venus gravity assists (VGA-1 through VGA-7) that sequenced the spacecraft into seven progressively closer orbital phases. Each row records the event date and time in UTC, perihelion distance (in solar radii, million km, and AU), heliocentric speed at perihelion, mission phase identifier, and Venus flyby altitude where applicable.
The historic December 24 2024 perihelion (E22) brought the spacecraft to 9.86 R_sun (6.86 million km) from the Sun's photosphere at 191.8 km/s — about 691,000 km/h — making it the closest and fastest solar approach ever achieved. This encounter and the two subsequent Phase 7 perihelions in 2025 completed the seven-year primary mission. Use this dataset alongside juliensimon/spacex-launches and juliensimon/blue-origin-launches for mission-cadence comparisons, with juliensimon/sunspot and juliensimon/solar-flares for solar-activity context, and with juliensimon/donki for direct correlation of Parker observations against catalogued space weather events.
This dataset is suitable for tabular classification, time-series forecasting tasks.
Schema
Quick stats
- 24 perihelion encounters (E1 through E24) plus 7 Venus gravity assists across 7 years of nominal mission
- Closest approach: 9.86 R_sun (6.86 million km) on December 24 2024 — the closest any spacecraft has ever come to the Sun
- Fastest perihelion speed: 191.8 km/s (~690,480 km/h) — the highest speed ever achieved by a human-made object
- Lowest Venus flyby altitude: 317 km (VGA-7, November 6 2024) — final gravity assist that placed the spacecraft into Phase 7
- Mission organized into 7 orbital phases keyed to the 7 Venus gravity assists, with perihelion altitude stepping down from 35.66 to 9.86 R_sun
Usage
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/parker-solar-probe-encounters", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()from datasets import load_dataset
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
df = load_dataset("juliensimon/parker-solar-probe-encounters", split="train").to_pandas()
# Plot perihelion altitude over time, color-coded by mission phase
peri = df[df["event_type"] == "perihelion"]
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(12, 5))
for phase, sub in peri.groupby("mission_phase"):
ax.scatter(sub["event_datetime_utc"], sub["perihelion_distance_rsun"],
label=phase, s=80)
# Overlay Venus flybys as vertical lines
for _, row in df[df["event_type"] == "venus_flyby"].iterrows():
ax.axvline(row["event_datetime_utc"], color="grey", alpha=0.4, linestyle="--")
ax.set_ylabel("Perihelion distance (R_sun)")
ax.set_title("Parker Solar Probe — perihelion altitude across mission phases")
ax.invert_yaxis() # closer = lower
ax.legend(title="Mission phase", ncol=2)
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()
# Highlight the historic E22 closest approach
e22 = peri[peri["sequence_number"] == 22].iloc[0]
print(f"E22: {e22['event_datetime_utc']:%Y-%m-%d %H:%M UTC} — "
f"{e22['perihelion_distance_rsun']:.2f} R_sun at {e22['perihelion_speed_kms']:.1f} km/s")Data source
https://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/Spacecraft/index.php
Related datasets
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About the author
Created by Julien Simon — AI Operating Partner at Fortino Capital. Part of the Space Datasets collection.
Citation
@dataset{parker_solar_probe_encounters,
title = {Parker Solar Probe Encounter Timeline},
author = {Simon, Julien},
year = {2026},
url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/parker-solar-probe-encounters},
publisher = {Hugging Face},
note = {Derived from Parker Solar Probe, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, https://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/Spacecraft/index.php}
}