A historic and audacious mission to probe some of the sun’s deepest secrets is underway.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe lifted off this morning (Aug. 12) at 3:31 a.m. EDT (0731 GMT) from a pad here at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, its powerful United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket carving an arc of orange flame into the predawn sky.
If all goes according to plan, the Parker Solar Probe will end up traveling faster than any craft ever has, and getting unprecedentedly close to the sun; indeed, it will fly through our star’s outer atmosphere, known as the corona. And the measurements the probe makes there will reveal key insights about our star’s inner workings that have eluded scientists for decades.
“It’s going to be absolutely phenomenal,” NASA Chief Scientist Jim Green told Space.com. “We’ve been wanting to do this for 60 years, ever since Eugene Parker got up and said, ‘I believe the sun is outgassing.'”
That prediction was met with much skepticism back in the 1950s, but time proved Parker, a pioneering University of Chicago astrophysicist, right. We now know that outgassing as the solar wind, the stream of charged particles that flows constantly from the sun. And Parker, who turned 91 in June, became the first living person ever to have a NASA mission named after him.
Photos of Parker and a digital copy of his seminal 1958 solar-wind paper are flying on the newly launched spacecraft, aboard a memory card that also bears the names of more than 1.1 million people. These folks — who include “Star Trek” icon William Shatner — responded to a March 2018 NASA invitation to kiss the sun along with the Parker Solar Probe.
This morning’s launch was initially supposed to occur on July 31, but several technical issues pushed the attempt back to yesterday (Aug. 11). And that try was scuttled after a Delta IV Heavy gaseous-helium pressure alarm went off less than 2 minutes before the scheduled liftoff.
