The spacecraft will « touch » the sun and provide information which may be vital in protecting Earth from dangerous solar weather.
At an event at the University in Chicago, NASA announced that it would be naming the spacecraft after Dr Eugene Parker, just days before Dr Parker’s 90th birthday.
It is the first time that NASA has ever named a spacecraft after a living researcher, and NASA said it was making history by honouring Dr Parker, the American astrophysicist who first developed the theory of the solar wind.
The mission, formerly known as Solar Probe Plus, is scheduled to launch during a 20 day window between 31 July 2018 and 19 August 2018.
First announced in 2008, the robotic spacecraft will orbit within four million miles of the sun’s surface. It will be exposed to more heat and radiation than any other spacecraft in history.
It will explore the sun’s outer atmosphere where it will be protected from its intense power, 475 times what other spacecraft experience while orbiting Earth, by using a protective solar shadow shield.
The mission will allow scientists to make critical observations that will answer decades-old questions about the physics of how stars work, including why the sun’s corona – the aura of plasma that surrounds the star – is so much hotter than its surface, and how the solar wind is generated.
It will be fitted with a number of scientific instruments which will help scientists measure the flow of energy that heats and accelerates the solar corona and solar wind.
Other instruments will determine the structure and dynamics of the plasma and magnetic fields at the sources of the solar wind, and explore mechanisms that accelerate and transport energetic particles.
These instruments will be used during its trajectory, which will see it use seven Venus flybys over nearly seven years to gradually shrink its orbit around the run, coming as close as 3.7 million miles to the sun.
The spacecraft will go close enough to the sun to watch the solar wind speed up from subsonic to supersonic, and it will fly though the birthplace of the highest-energy solar particles.
The resulting data will improve forecasts of major space weather events that impact life on Earth, as well as satellites and astronauts in space.
In a paper published earlier this month, declassified documents allowed NASA to examine how nuclear testing during the cold war affected space weather .
NASA noted a recent study by the National Academy of Sciences which estimated that without advance warning a huge solar event could cause two trillion dollars in damage in the US alone, and could leave the eastern seaboard of the US without power for a year.
