Mission Into The Sun

We’ve visited Pluto and the outer reaches of the Solar System, and our rovers are trundling over the surface of Mars. Yet the Sun has remained stubbornly out of reach… until now

- Dr Stuart Clark

This summer, NASA will launch one of its most ambitious space missions to date: the Parker Solar Probe. Travelling at a blistering 720,000km/h (450,000mph), the spacecraft will repeatedly dive closer to the Sun than any previous spacecraft in history. It will venture so close that the Parker Solar Probe team refers to it as touching the Sun. In fact, it will dive in and out of the Sun’s atmosphere, known as its corona. And it’s not going to be alone up there.

In February 2019, the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch a solar mission of its own, called Solar Orbiter. This craft will not go as close to the Sun as its NASA counterpart but it will still be bathed in intense sunlight, almost 500 times that experienced by a spacecraft in Earth’s orbit. Unlike Parker Solar Probe, which spends only a short amount of time in the fierce heat as it dives in and out, Solar Orbiter will stay put for years, watching and measuring the Sun.

Both of these missions have a single goal: to find out more about the way electrified gas known as plasma is launched from the Sun’s atmosphere out into space. This continuous stream is known as the solar wind. It carries energy and the Sun’s magnetic field through space, and understanding it could solve a problem that’s been mystifying scientists for decades and could be the key to safeguarding our technological society.

WHAT A WIND