MISSION TO THE SUN

£1.3bn Nasa probe will be the closest encounter yet

IT will be the hottest and fastest space mission yet.

Nasa is sending a craft to ‘touch the sun’ for the first time, it was announced yesterday.

It has hitherto been impossible to enter the sun’s atmosphere, where temperatures start at almost 1,400C.

But next year a super-powered probe travelling at 118 miles a second – nearly three times as fast as previous missions – will overcome the supersonic solar winds, flares and radiation to get seven times closer to the surface than before.

The Parker Solar Probe will fly to within 3.7million miles of the surface. The previous record-holder, Helios 2, came within 27million miles – only just inside the orbit of Mercury – in 1976.

The £1.3billion mission will discover more about our closest star – some 93million miles from Earth – and help us forecast major space weather events that could destroy power and communication networks. To combat the intense heat, scientists have cre-

‘It is time to go up and pay a visit’

ated a 4.5in carbon composite shield which will maintain the instruments used to record solar flares and shocks at room temperature.

Dr Nicola Fox, mission project scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said: We have gone as far as we can just looking at things – now it is time to go up and pay it a visit.

‘The solar probe is going to be the hottest, fastest mission – I like to call it the coolest mission under the sun.’

The probe is named in honour of astrophysicist Eugene Parker, now 89, who in 1958 did groundbreaking work on understanding solar storms and the solar wind – a stream of charged particles emitted by the sun that causes the Northern Lights.

It is due to launch from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida between July 31 and August 19 next year.

Its seven-year mission will use the gravitational field of Venus to orbit the sun 24 times, getting closest in December 2024.