Chronology of the solar probes

This list shows, in chronological order, spacecraft launched with the primary aim of exploring the sun.

No.	mission	image	Start date ( UTC )	organization	Results
1.	Helios 1		December 10, 1974, 7:11 am	DFVLR , NASA	The probe reached a solar orbit with a minimum solar distance of 46.5 million kilometers, which corresponds to the closest distance of the innermost planet Mercury to the sun. Contact with Helios 1 ended on March 16, 1986.
2.	Helios 2		January 15, 1976, 05:34	DFVLR , NASA	The probe reached a solar orbit with a minimum solar distance of 43.5 million kilometers. Contact with Helios 2 ended in December 1981.
3.	Ulysses		October 6, 1990, 11:47 am	ESA , NASA	A space probe that was swungby at Jupiter into a polar solar orbit. The Ulysses mission was officially terminated on June 29, 2009, long after the originally planned life of the probe due to insufficient on-board energy.
4th	SOHO		December 2, 1995, 8:08 am	ESA , NASA	A solar observatory that is located in a halo orbit with a radius of 600,000 km around the (inner) Lagrange point L 1 in the sun-earth system at a distance of approx. 1.5 million kilometers from earth.
5.	STEREO		October 26, 2006, 00:52	NASA	Two almost identical space probes that observe the sun and the interaction of its particle eruptions and fields with the earth's magnetosphere in three dimensions (stereo effect) and also monitor its side facing away from the earth.
6th	Parker Solar Probe		August 12, 2018, 7:31 am	NASA	A space probe that is supposed to approach the sun's surface within 8.5 solar radii.
7th	Solar orbiter		February 10, 2020, 4:03 am	ESA	A space probe designed to study the solar wind, the heliosphere and space weather . To do this, it should approach the sun up to 42 million kilometers.

Individual evidence

1. ^ The Mission: Launch. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory , accessed August 13, 2018 .