3Q: A bold mission to touch the sun
On Saturday, NASA launched a bold mission to fly directly into the sun’s atmosphere, with a spacecraft named the Parker Solar Probe, after solar astrophysicist Eugene Parker. The incredibly resilient vessel, vaguely shaped like a lightbulb the size of a small car, was launched early in the morning from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Its trajectory will aim straight for the sun, where the probe will come closer to the solar surface than any other spacecraft in history. The probe will orbit the blistering corona, withstanding unprecedented levels of radiation and heat, in order to beam back to Earth data on the sun’s activity. Scientists hope such data will illuminate the physics of stellar behavior. The data will also help to answer questions about how the sun’s winds, eruptions, and flares shape weather in space, and how that activity may affect life on Earth, along with astronauts and...