by AMINA KHAN
It won’t be much to look at – a few inches across, shaped rather like a coffee cup attached to a Kindle – but to Kasper, it’ll serve as eyes across nearly 100 million miles of space.
In less than seven years, that cup will be journeying to the center of the solar system to scoop up bits of the sun.
“This really has been a life’s dream,” said Kasper, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
In 2018, NASA is scheduled to launch a spacecraft from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida to fly, Icarus-like, dangerously close to our star.
Fitted with a select set of instruments, Solar Probe Plus will address two questions that solar physicists have tussled with for decades: How does the corona, that ghostly, spiked halo seen during a total solar eclipse, heat to more than a million degrees, far hotter than the sun’s surface? And what powers the solar wind, the stream of charged particles that flows from the corona?
An up-close look at the sun may ultimately help scientists predict solar flares, as well as coronal mass ejections – “solar storms” like those launched at Earth last week. These events send a barrage of high-energy particles crashing against the Earth’s magnetic field, at times disabling satellites, wiping out power grids, forcing airlines to reroute flights and potentially exposing astronauts to fatal doses of radiation.
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