Parker Solar Probe by the Helios 2 spacecraft. The "Parker Solar Probe" concept originates from a predecessor "Solar Orbiter" project conceived in the 1990s. Similar in design and objectives, the "Solar Probe" mission served as one of the centerpieces of the eponymous Outer Planet/Solar Probe (OPSP) program formulated by NASA. The first three missions of the program were planned to be: the "Solar Orbiter", the Pluto and Kuiper belt reconnaissance mission "Pluto Kuiper Express", and the "Europa Orbiter" astrobiology mission focused on Europa. The original "Solar Probe" design used a gravity assist from Jupiter to enter a polar orbit which dropped almost directly
Planet the Drake equation, which estimates the number of intelligent, communicating civilizations that exist in the Milky Way. There are exoplanets that are much closer to their parent star than any planet in the Solar System is to the Sun, and there are also exoplanets that are much farther from their star. Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun at 0.4 AU, takes 88 days for an orbit, but the shortest known orbits for exoplanets take only a few hours, e.g. Kepler-70b. The Kepler-11 system has five of its planets in shorter orbits than Mercury's, all of them much more massive