NASA to launch first Sun-skimming spacecraft

The probe will endure temperatures of about 1,370 C. Pic/AFP

NASA is poised to launch a $1.5 billion spacecraft on a brutally hot journey toward the Sun, offering scientists the closest-ever view of our strange and mysterious star.

After the Parker Solar Probe blasts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida on August 11, it will become the first spacecraft ever to fly through the Sun's scorching atmosphere, known as the corona.

Understanding how the corona works will help scientists anticipate dangerous space weather storms, which can disrupt the power grid on Earth. "It's of fundamental importance for us to be able to predict space weather much the way we predict weather on Earth," explained Alex Young, a solar scientist at NASA. The corona is a "very strange, unfamiliar environment for us."

The probe is named after Eugene Parker, the 91-year-old pioneering solar astrophysicist, and the US space agency has coined it as the first mission to "touch the Sun." It will actually skim by at a distance of 6.16 million kilometers above the Sun's surface.

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