NASA is about to 'touch' a star for the first time — here are the hellish conditions the Parker Solar Probe must survive

United Launch Alliance

• NASA's Parker Solar Probe successfully launched into space on Sunday, August 12 at 3:31 a.m. EDT.
• But to "touch" the sun and study its weather, the $1.5-billion mission must survive hellish conditions.
• Temperatures will reach a searing 2,500 degrees when the spacecraft zooms through the star's atmosphere at 430,000 mph.
• Once the probe runs out of fuel, pretty much everything but its carbon heat shield will be destroyed.

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Touching a star isn't easy. The sun is an enormous, searing-hot orb of plasma that generates a chaos of magnetic fields and can unleash deadly blasts of particles at a moment's notice.

But that is precisely what NASA is in the process of doing — 24 times or more — with its car-size Parker Solar Probe (PSP).

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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See Also:

• NASA is about to launch the fastest spacecraft in history in a $1.5-billion attempt to 'touch the sun' for the first time
• NASA just gave $44 million to 6 private companies — including Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin — to develop 'tipping point' space technologies
• NASA is flying a $1.5 billion spacecraft into the sun — here's why

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