NASA is mapping out its ‘coolest, hottest mission’

USA TODAY CHICAGO Next summer’s maiden unmanned mission to the sun’s atmosphere will travel at 430,000 miles per hour, whipping the distance between New York City and Tokyo in about a minute’s time, NASA scientists said Wednesday.

Details of the “unprecedented” mission to “touch the sun” came as the agency announced it was naming the craft after astrophysicist Eugene Parker, whose work has revolutionized scientists’ understanding of the sun.

The probe will use advanced material technologies able to stand up to blistering temperatures of 2,500 degrees as it approaches the outermost part of the sun’s atmosphere. It will make crucial observations NASA hopes will answer decades-old questions about how stars work.

“Solar probe is going to be the hottest, fastest mission,” joked Nicola Fox, the mission project scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “I like to call it the coolest, hottest mission under the sun.”

The mission, now dubbed Parker Solar Probe, will come within 4 million miles of the sun’s surface, facing heat and radiation unlike any man-made object in history, according to NASA.

It’s the first time a NASA probe has been named after a living scientist, said Thomas Zurbuchen, who heads NASA Science Mission Directorate.

In the 1950s, Parker developed the theory of solar wind and predicted the spiral magnetic field in the outer solar system. Parker posited that a strong wind from the sun fills interstellar space with ionized gas.

Parker, 89, said the upcoming mission was a stretch of the imagination when he began his seminal research paper, which he recalled faced heavy skepticism from colleagues: “I was simply concentrating on getting the thing published over the dead bodies of the referees.”