* Astronomy

NASA names solar mission after UChicago physicist

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.
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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.
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Probe To Visit Solar Corona

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.
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