Almost a year ago NASA crashed a series of probes into the Moon, looking to find water beneath the surface. The mission was heralded as a success, even though many amateur astronomers were disappointed to find the show was not as spectacular as they had hoped.
Now NASA is getting even more ambitious, planning to crash a satellite into the Sun's atmosphere. The temperature in the outer atmosphere (corona) can reach temperatures into the millions of degrees. This is orders of magnitude hotter than the Sun's surface. The reason for this has remained a mystery (though theories of magnetic recombination are thought to be at the heart of it).
So, NASA's Solar Probe Plus, scheduled to launch by 2018, will explore the Sun's atmosphere and solar wind. It will approach the outer corona, some four million miles or more from the Sun's surface, and take the most detailed measurements of the solar environment ever obtained. Then, the probe will hopefully last long enough to give scientists enough information to begin to decipher the Sun's mysteries.
Image Rendering Credit: NASA
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