NASA’s red hot journey to begin in 2018

Wearing a nearly 5-inch thick coat of carbon-composite solar shields, NASA’s Solar Probe Plus will explore the sun’s atmosphere in a mission that begins in the summer of 2018.

It’s not a journey that any human can make, so NASA is sending a roughly 10-foot high probe on the historic mission that will put it about closer to the sun than any spacecraft has ever reached before.

The probe will have to withstand heat and radiation never before experienced by any spacecraft, but the specially designed mission will also address questions that couldn’t be answered before. Understanding the sun in greater detail can also shed light on Earth and its place in the solar system, researchers said.

This is NASA’s first mission to the sun and its outermost atmosphere, called the corona.

The probe will eventually orbit within 3.7 million miles of the sun’s surface. The observations and data could provide insight about the physics of stars, change what we know about the mysterious corona, increase understanding of solar wind and help improve forecasting of major space weather events. Those events can impact satellites and astronauts, as well as the Earth -including the power grid and radiation exposure on airline flights, NASA said.

The mission’s objectives include “tracing the flow of energy that heats and accelerates the sun’s corona and solar wind, determining the structure and dynamics of the plasma and magnetic fields at the sources of the solar wind and explore mechanisms that accelerate and transport energetic particles.”

According to the space agency, the idea of the solar probe originated more than 50 years ago.