The Sun: America's Next Space Odyssey

About 14 months from today America will embark on a historic space mission. A probe jam-packed with scientific instruments will rocket nearly 90 million miles through space for a close-up view of the sun. The craft's journey through searing heat and dangerous radiation will take seven years.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has announced the spacecraft will provide scientists with the closet-ever observations of the sun, one of more than an estimated 100 billion stars in the Milky Way.  The probe will orbit within 3.9 million miles of the sun's surface.

NASA has scheduled the launch window for the Delta IV rocket for July 31-August 19, 2018. Once the rocket roars off the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, it will jettison the probe into the atmosphere, propelling it through space at a blistering speed of 430,000 miles per hour.

NASA has dubbed the spacecraft, the Parker Solar Probe, in honor of astrophysicist Eugene Parker, whose groundbreaking work forms much of what we know today about our nearest star, a 864,000-mile-wide caldron of hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, neon, nitrogen, magnesium, iron and silicon.

The sun, about 109 times larger than the Earth's diameter, generates heat and light for our planet.  The visible part of the sun is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, while temperatures at its core are a scorching 27 million degrees.  That makes the epic mission a daunting challenge for scientists.

The probe and its instruments will be sheathed in a thick carbon-composite shell designed to withstand temperatures that likely will reach 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit even at its relatively 'safe' 3.9 million mile distance from the surface.  The craft's payload will remain at near room temperature.

The main goals for the ambitious mission are to determine how energy and heat move through the solar corona, the upper most region of the sun.  The area reaches scalding temperatures from 900,000 to 10.8 million degrees Fahrenheit.  Matter from the corona spews into space as solar wind.

This ferocious wind whooshes past our planet at speeds of more than one million miles per hour. Disturbances in the solar wind shake the Earth's magnetic field and scatter energy into the radiation belts near our planet.  Scientists want to investigate how these winds impact space weather.

Parker Solar Project Scientist Nicola Fox of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory has high hopes for the mission. "It's a spacecraft loaded with technological breakthroughs that will solve many of the largest mysteries about our star, including finding out why the sun's corona is so much hotter than its surface," Fox says.

Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland is managing the mission for NASA.  The laboratory will also be responsible for designing and building the spacecraft.  Once the Parker Solar Probe is launched into space, the lab's scientists will operate the craft from Earth.

The sun was born about 4.6 billion years ago.  Now scientists soon will get their best view ever of Earth's nearest star.  The data from the scientific instruments should help us better understand our solar system and learn how the sun effects the environment on Earth and beyond.

Knowledge gained from the mission also will help solve practical issues back on our planet.  For instance, the data about the sun will improve satellite communications, provide insight into power grid interruptions and measure the amount of radiation exposure on airline flights.

And perhaps the exciting prospect of the historic space mission will unite all Americans to support this bold adventure.  That alone would justify the multi-million dollar price tag for the groundbreaking space quest.