A red-hot voyage to the sun is going to bring us closer to our star than ever before.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will be the first spacecraft to “touch” the sun, hurtling through the sizzling solar atmosphere and coming within just 3.8 million miles (6 million kilometers) of the surface.
It’s designed to take solar punishment like never before, thanks to its revolutionary heat shield that’s capable of withstanding 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,370 degrees Celsius).
Liftoff is set for the pre-dawn hours of Saturday for this first-of-its-kind mission to a star.
“The coolest, hottest mission, baby, that’s what it is,” said Nicola Fox, the project scientist at Johns Hopkins University.
Roughly the size of a small car, Parker will get nearly seven times closer to the sun than previous spacecraft. To snuggle up to the sun, it will fly past Venus seven times over seven years. Each flyby will provide an orbit-shaping gravity boost, drawing it ever closer to the sun and straight into the corona — the sun’s outermost atmosphere.
The closer, the better for figuring out why the corona is hundreds of times hotter than the sun’s surface. Another mystery scientists hope to solve: What drives the solar wind? That’s the steady, supersonic stream of charged particles blasting off the corona and into space in all directions.
