NASA’s Solar Plus Probe Spacecraft To Fly To The Sun And ‘Touch’ Its Face

The Sun is a gigantic ball of energy with a core temperature that goes above 15 million degrees Celsius. However, NASA wants to launch a spacecraft in 2018 that will get closer to the host star than any other man-made device has ever got.

Coronal mass ejections (CME) or solar flares are hazardous and powerful enough to have a damaging impact on Earth’s power grids, aircraft and satellites. Spacecrafts, astronauts and even celestial bodies are vulnerable to solar flares.

The damaging effects of solar flares make them even more important to study the phenomenon to understand why the Sun emits such destructive energetic charge. Studying the phenomenon can help humans to accurately predict and thereby be prepared for an upcoming surge of solar flares.

For this reason, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Cambridge, Massachusetts-based non-profit engineering organization Charles Stark Draper Laboratory are collaborating to develop specialized sensors for NASA’s proposed solar spacecraft. It will fly into the Sun atmosphere and “touch” the Sun’s face to learn more about its behavior.

Known as the Solar Probe Plus (SPP), the spacecraft is currently being designed and made by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. According to an Indian Tribune report, once SPP is launched in 2018, it will take the help of Venus flybys over nearly seven years to eventually shrink its orbit around the Sun. During this period, SPP will conduct 24 flybys of the Sun and pass into the upper atmosphere or corona of the Sun, reaching within 6.4 million km of the solar surface.

The close approach will enable SPP to gather data that will provide information about the mechanisms that heat the corona and accelerate solar flares. SPP may not survive the extremely dangerous feat. However, it will help humans get more insight into the risks that solar weather has for modern communication, including power grids, aviation, satellites, GPS and telecommunications.