A Place On The Sun

After 60 years of exploration, NASA is finally sending a spaceship to the star at the center of our solar system.

- Amy Thompson

WHEN A CAMPFIRE IS TOO HOT, TAKE A STEP back. This advice is brought to you by common sense and basic physics. But here’s a mystery: Why isn’t this true for the sun, whose surface is actually cooler than its fiery atmosphere?

Eugene Parker was puzzling over this and other mysteries when he got his big eureka moment: The sun, he realized, emits a steady stream of hot particles that causes the northern lights and occasionally fries power grids and communications satellites. This “solar wind,” as Parker called it, didn’t exactly explain the campfire conundrum, but it earned the 30-year-old grad student a Ph.D. and a reputation as one of the foremost astronomers of all time.

The same year Parker published his work, in 1958, a group of scientists drew up a bucket list of 14 robotic space missions to various destinations in the solar system. Over the next 60 years, NASA sent ships to 13 of those places—the moon, the asteroids and every one of the known planets, from Mercury to Neptune, and even the dwarf planet Pluto. They explored the entire solar system, except the biggest, brightest and arguably most mysterious object at its center: the sun.

NASA is now making amends. On August 11, if all goes according to plan, a Delta IV heavy-lift rocket will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with a squatty probe the size of a Volkswagen in its nose cone. A special third-stage booster will push the probe out of Earth’s orbit and send it zooming toward the sun at speeds of up to 430,000 mph, making it the fastest spacecraft ever flown. Its seven-year mission: to give scientists the closest look yet at the flaming enigma at the heart of our corner of the universe.