Nasa on intrepid mission to the Sun
If all went well overnight, Nasa launched a spacecraft from Cape Canaveral on a mission to fly where no probe has ever gone before — into the Sun’s scorching outer atmosphere.
The US$1.5 billion (NZ$2.5b) Parker Solar Probe blasted off atop one of the most powerful rockets in the world, a mammoth Delta-IV Heavy rocket, eventually hitting recordbreaking speeds on its way to complete 24 orbits of the Sun over the course of seven years.
During this time, the car-sized craft will swing around Venus seven times, using the planet’s gravity to push it closer and closer to our closest star with each pass. Eventually, the Parker probe will get within 6.16 million kilometres of the Sun’s surface.
It will be subjected to temperatures of roughly 1377C when it comes closer to the Sun than any spacecraft in history — but behind its 11.5cm-thick carbon-composite sunshield it will only feel like a summer’s day, with this sheltered region maxing out at about 30C.
The mission will require 55 times more energy than would be needed to reach Mars, according to Nasa, and put the Parker probe well within the Sun’s corona, which extends about 8 million kilometres above the surface.
When it hurtles past the Sun it will do so at 700,000km/h.
“We’ll be going where no spacecraft has dared go before — within the corona of a star,” said project scientist Nicky Fox, of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.
“With each orbit, we’ll be seeing new regions of the Sun’s atmosphere and learning things about stellar mechanics that we’ve wanted to explore for decades.”
Parker probe’s unprecedented access to the corona will let it study the acceleration of solar wind up close, and observe the solar flares and coronal mass ejections that have rippling effects on space weather and communication systems down near Earth.