NASA Is Daring To Launch A Car-Sized Spacecraft 4 Million Miles Inside The Sun's Atmosphere

The NASA is getting ready to launch mankind¡¯s first ever space probe to penetrate the sun's raging hot atmosphere, and go where no manmade instrument has gone before.

For the first time in the history of mankind, NASA is looking at sending a car-sized spacecraft that will penetrate 4 million miles inside the sun's atmosphere, making it the first space device to have ever moved this close to the sun.

Photo Credits: Reuters/Light bar testing being performed on Parker Solar Probe

The Parker Solar Probe, a robotic spacecraft the size of a small car, is slated to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, with August 06 targeted as the launch date for the planned seven-year mission.

Alex Young, associate director for science in the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in the US said "We've been studying the Sun for decades, and now we're finally going to go where the action is."

The sun, a spherical star made up of hot plasma can reach more than 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degree celsius) at its gravitational centre. The probe is expected to explore the corona, which is a region of the Sun only seen from Earth when the Moon blocks out the Sun's bright face during total solar eclipses.

Photo Credits: AFP/ Handout illustration of NASA

The last mission recorded to have gone closest to the Sun was carried out in 1976 when a probe titled Helios 2 came within 27 million miles.

What's so special about the Parker Solar Probe?

The car sized spacecraft will use seven Venus flybys over nearly seven years to steadily reduce its orbit around the Sun, using instruments designed to image the solar wind and study electric and magnetic fields, coronal plasma and energetic particles.

The instruments have been designed with a heat shield of a tolerable 85 degrees Fahrenheit (29 degrees Celsius) even as the spacecraft faces temperatures reaching nearly 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,370 degrees Celsius) at its closest pass.

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The probe is named after an American solar astrophysicist Eugene Newman Parker. Nicky Fox, Parker Solar Probe's project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab said "The Sun's energy is always flowing past our world.

And even though the solar wind is invisible, we can see it encircling the poles as the aurora, which are beautiful - but reveal the enormous amount of energy and particles that cascade into our atmosphere." The corona holds the answers to many of scientists' outstanding questions about the Sun's activity and processes.