United Launch Alliance
- NASA‘s Parker Solar Probe successfully launched into space on Sunday, August 12 at 3:31 a.m. EDT.
- But to “touch” the sun and study its weather, the $ 1.5-billion mission must survive hellish conditions.
- Temperatures will reach a searing 2,500 degrees when the spacecraft zooms through the star’s atmosphere at 430,000 mph.
- Once the probe runs out of fuel, pretty much everything but its carbon heat shield will be destroyed.
Touching a star isn’t easy. The sun is an enormous, searing-hot orb of plasma that generates a chaos of magnetic fields and can unleash deadly blasts of particles at a moment’s notice.
But that is precisely what NASA is in the process of doing — 24 times or more — with its car-size Parker Solar Probe (PSP).See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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See Also:
- NASA is about to launch the fastest spacecraft in history in a $ 1.5-billion attempt to ‘touch the sun’ for the first time
- NASA just gave $ 44 million to 6 private companies — including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin — to develop ‘tipping point’ space technologies
- NASA is flying a $ 1.5 billion spacecraft into the sun — here’s why
