Nasa gets set for its solar mission
The Sun is our nearest star. It is an average of 93 million miles from Earth and hotter than you could ever imagine. Without the heat and light emitted by this enormous sphere of glowing gas, life on our planet could not exist.
Next year the US space agency, Nasa, plans to launch an unmanned spacecraft directly into the Sun’s atmosphere. The craft will orbit around four million miles from the fiery star’s surface – closer than any mission has been ever before. It will explore the Sun’s superheated outer atmosphere, and Nasa’s scientists hope that its findings will help them answer questions that have puzzled them for decades. “It’s a spacecraft loaded with technological breakthroughs that will solve many of the largest mysteries about our star, including finding out why the Sun’s corona is so much hotter than its surface,” said project scientist, Nicola Fox. It’s also hoped that the mission will help us understand how events and conditions in the Sun’s atmosphere impact weather in space and on Earth.
On 31 May, Nasa announced that the spacecraft will be named after Eugene Parker, a scientist whose groundbreaking work on solar wind (streams of energy that flow out of the Sun’s atmosphere) helped scientists understand how stars work. It’s the first time that a Nasa mission has been named after a living scientist. The announcement was made a few days before Parker’s 90th birthday. Parker said, “The solar probe is going to a region of space that has never been explored before. It’s very exciting that we’ll finally get a look.”
The Parker Solar Probe will take off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, US in the summer of 2018.