美宇航局将发射飞船直飞太阳
A NASA spacecraft will aim straight for the sun next year and bear the name of the astrophysicist who predicted the existence of the solar wind nearly 60 years ago.
美国宇航局将于明年发射一艘直飞太阳的宇宙飞船，该飞船以一位天体物理学家的名字命名，这位天体物理学家在60年前预测到太阳风的存在。
The space agency announced Wednesday that the red-hot mission would be named after Eugene Parker, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. It's the first NASA spacecraft to be named after a researcher who is still alive, noted the agency's science mission chief, Thomas Zurbuchen.
Scheduled to launch next summer from Cape Canaveral, the Parker Solar Probe will fly within 4 million miles of the sun's surface -- right into the solar atmosphere. That will be considerably closer than any other spacecraft, and subject the probe to brutal heat and radiation like no other man-made structure before. The materials weren't available until now to undertake such a grueling mission.
The purpose is to study the sun's outer atmosphere and better understand how stars like ours work.
NASA spacecraft have traveled inside the orbit of Mercury, the innermost planet.
"But until you actually go there and touch the sun, you really can't answer these questions," like why is the corona -- the outer plasma-loaded atmosphere -- hotter than the actual surface of the sun, said mission project scientist Nicola Fox of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory.