Journey to the center of the solar system

A car-sized spacecraft will be launched sometime before 2018 on a mission to the center of the solar system – the sun itself. NASA’s Solar Probe Plus (+) will be sent into the atmosphere of the sun called the corona. … Continue reading →

Solar Probe Plus, its primary solar panels retracted into the shadows of its protective solar shield, approaches the Sun. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL
A car-sized spacecraft will be launched sometime before 2018 on a mission to the center of the solar system – the sun itself. NASA’s Solar Probe Plus (+) will be sent into the atmosphere of the sun called the corona. “For the first time, we’ll be able to ‘touch, taste and smell’ the sun,” said Lika Guhathakurta, Solar Probe+ program scientist at NASA.
Unlike Earth’s life-friendly atmosphere of nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor and carbon dioxide, the sun’s corona is a thin, extremely hot gas of subatomic particles - electrons and protons – called a plasma. While the sun’s surface temperature is around 10,000 degrees, the atmosphere is nearly 200 times hotter. With its 3-D imaging of the solar wind and solar shock waves, scientists hope to nail down both the source of the corona’s heat ...