The Solar Probe Plus mission will now carry the name of Eugene Parker, who conducted pioneering work on the "solar wind" - a stream of charged particles flowing out from the Sun's "atmosphere". The spacecraft will swoop to within four million miles of the Sun's surface, enduring temperatures of about 2,500C. The mission is due to launch in 2018. Read more
NASA has named the first mission to fly a spacecraft directly into the sun's atmosphere in honour of Prof. Eugene Parker, a pioneering physicist at the University of Chicago. The Parker Solar Probe will launch next summer on a mission to fly within 4 million miles of the sun's surface to study the star with unprecedented precision. Parker, the S. Chandrasekhar Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Physics, is best known for developing the concept of solar wind - the stream of electrically charged particles emitted by the sun. He was honored May 31 at a public celebration on campus that included colleagues and students from UChicago and leaders from NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Read more
Parker Solar Probe: NASA's journey to touch the Sun
Originally called the Solar Probe Plus, the mission was renamed overnight in honour of astrophysicist Professor Eugene Parker, who predicted the existence of high-speed solar winds - the mass of particles that are spewed into space from the Sun. Set to kick off next July, the plan is to plunge the Parker Solar Probe into the Sun's corona - the hazy bit you can see around the edges of the Sun during a total solar eclipse - to study this phenomenon. Read more
NASA Gives Green Light for Johns Hopkins APL to Begin Building Solar Probe Plus Spacecraft
NASA's Solar Probe Plus mission - which will fly closer to the sun than any spacecraft has before - reached a major milestone last month when it successfully completed its Critical Design Review, or CDR. Read more
While satellites orbit the Earth and spacecraft have traveled to other cosmic bodies, the Sun has thus far escaped human exploration. This will change, however, in 2018, according to astronomy lecturer Justin C. Kasper in a talk on Tuesday regarding NASAs impending solar probe. Read more
NASA Selects Investigations for First Sun Encounter Mission
NASA has begun development of a mission to visit and study the sun closer than ever before. The unprecedented project, named Solar Probe Plus, is slated to launch no later than 2018. The small car-sized spacecraft will plunge directly into the sun's atmosphere approximately 6.4 million kilometres from our star's surface. It will explore a region no other spacecraft ever has encountered. NASA has selected five science investigations that will unlock the sun's biggest mysteries, including one led by a scientist from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Read more