NASA to Launch Spacecraft Closer to Sun

The National Administration of Aeronautics and Space (NASA) has devised an spacecraft built with a material capable of withstanding temperatures so high as to get close to the Sun and study it, according to the U.S. agency.

Designed at Johns Hopkins University, the Solar Parker Probe will depart on the 11th from Cape Canaveral (the main center of U.S. space activities) on a mission that will last seven years and analyze the solar wind.

The spacecraft will be six million kilometers from the solar surface and will travel up to 150 million kilometers from Earth. No one had ever been so close to the Sun before.

The spacecraft is aimed at collecting data on the behavior of the largest source of electromagnetic radiation of this planetary system, in an environment of extreme temperatures, with massive amounts of radiation and a speed of 200 kilometers per second, and will go from Earth to the moon in half an hour.

To hit the solar surface, a probe should accelerate to the same orbital velocity of the Earth around the Sun with 30 kilometers per second in the opposite direction, but the current rocket technology can only cover a third of that speed.

To get close to the Sun and orbit it at such a short distance, the Parker probe will be accelerated by the Delta IV Heavy, the rocket in service with the highest power.

Several probes launched since the sixties have confirmed theories about the Sun's magnetic field and the existence of solar winds, and have allowed observing the behavior of the solar corona, which reaches temperatures higher than the sun's surface.