(CNN) Wearing a nearly 5-inch coat of carbon-composite solar shields, NASA's Parker Solar Probe will explore the sun's atmosphere in a mission that begins in the summer of 2018.
It's not a journey that any human can make, so NASA is sending a roughly 10-foot-high probe on the historic mission that will put it closer to the sun than any spacecraft has ever reached before.
The probe will have to withstand heat and radiation never before experienced by any spacecraft, but the specially designed mission will also address questions that couldn't be answered before. Understanding the sun in greater detail can also shed light on Earth and its place in the solar system, researchers said.
This is NASA's first mission to the sun and its outermost atmosphere, called the corona.
On Wednesday, the craft -- initially called the Solar Probe Plus -- was renamed the Parker Solar Probe in honor of astrophysicist Eugene Parker.
"This is the first time NASA has named a spacecraft for a living individual," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "It's a testament to the importance of his body of work, founding a new field of science that also inspired my own research and many important science questions NASA continues to study and further understand every day. I'm very excited to be personally involved honoring a great man and his unprecedented legacy."
Parker published research predicting the existence of solar wind in 1958, when he was a young professor at the University of Chicago's Enrico Fermi institute. At the time, astronomers believed that the space between planets was a vacuum. Parker's first paper was rejected, but it was saved by a colleague, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an astrophysicist who would be awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Cool unmanned space missions
Two new missions to Venus -- DAVINCI+ and VERITAS -- have been selected by NASA. These missions will shed light on how Venus became the inhospitable world it is today, despite the fact that it shares many characteristics with Earth.
This illustration shows the position of NASA's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes outside the heliosphere, a protective bubble created by the sun that extends well past the orbit of Pluto.
SPHEREx, the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, will study the beginning and evolution of the universe and determine how common the ingredients for life are within the planetary systems found in our galaxy, the Milky Way. It is targeted to launch in 2024.
This illustration shows NASA's Dragonfly rotorcraft-lander approaching a site on Saturn's exotic moon, Titan. Taking advantage of Titan's dense atmosphere and low gravity, Dragonfly will explore dozens of locations across the icy world, sampling and measuring the compositions of Titan's organic surface materials to characterize the habitability of Titan's environment and investigate the progression of prebiotic chemistry.
NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, slated to launch in the mid-2020s, has been named the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, after NASA's first chief astronomer.
This is an artist's concept of the Europa Clipper spacecraft, which will investigate Jupiter's icy moon.
Bright swaths of red in the upper atmosphere, known as airglow, can be seen in this image from the International Space Station. NASA's ICON mission will observe how interactions between terrestrial weather and a layer of charged particles called the ionosphere create the colorful glow.
NASA's Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk mission -- known as the GOLD mission -- will examine the response of the upper atmosphere to force from the sun, the magnetosphere and the lower atmosphere.
NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite launched in April and is already identifying exoplanets orbiting the brightest stars just outside our solar system. In the first three months since it began surveying the sky in July, it has found three exoplanets, with the promise of many more ahead.
This is an artist's concept of the Solar Probe Plus spacecraft approaching the sun. In order to unlock the mysteries of the corona, but also to protect a society that is increasingly dependent on technology from the threats of space weather, we will send Solar Probe Plus to touch the sun.
This illustration shows light beams from Earth pushing a tiny spacecraft's sail. The proposed Breakthrough Starshot project would send hundreds of "nanocraft" space probes 4.37 light years away -- at speeds of up to 100 million miles an hour -- to to explore Alpha Centauri, our nearest star system. The ambitious project is many years away from becoming reality.
Philanthropist Yuri Milner, left, and astrophysicist Stephen Hawking host a press conference to announce Breakthrough Starshot on Tuesday, April 12, 2016, in New York City. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg also sits on the mission's board of directors.
No spacecraft had ever gone to Pluto before NASA's
New Horizons made its fly-by on July 14, 2015. The probe sent back amazing, detailed images of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. It also dazzled scientists with new information about Pluto's atmosphere and landscape. New Horizons is still going today, heading out into the Kuiper Belt.
This image shows the Curiosity rover doing a test drill on a rock dubbed "Bonanza King" to see if it would be a good place to dig deeper and take a sample.
Curiosity was launched in 2011, and it is the most advanced rover ever built. It's helping scientists determine whether Mars is, or ever was, habitable for life forms.
The
Kepler space observatory is the first NASA mission dedicated to finding Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zones of stars. Launched in 2009, Kepler has been detecting planets and planet candidates with a wide range of sizes and orbital distances. Yes, we are still finding new planets.
NASA's infrared-wavelength space telescope called NEOWISE may help make us safer. The space telescope hunts for asteroids and comets, including those that could pose a threat to Earth. During its planned three-year survey through 2016, NEOWISE will identify near-Earth objects, gather data on their size and take other measurements. The probe was launched on December 14, 2009, for its original mission -- to perform an all-sky astronomical survey. The probe was put in hibernation for several years, but it was
fired up again in December 2013 to hunt for asteroids. Its images are now
available to the public online.
NASA's
Dawn spacecraft began orbiting the dwarf planet Ceres in March. Scientists were surprised by the large white spots shining on Ceres, seen above. On its way to Ceres, Dawn spent time studying the proto-planet Vesta in 2001. Ceres and Vesta are the two most massive bodies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The mission, launched in 2007, is giving scientists new knowledge of how the solar system formed and evolved.
NASA's
Deep Impact spacecraft was launched on January 12, 2005, and it traveled 268 million miles (431 million kilometers) to hurl its coffee table-sized probe into comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005. This image of Tempel 1 was taken by Deep Impact's camera 67 seconds after the probe hit the comet. Scattered light from the collision saturated the camera's detector and caused the bright splash seen in this image. The Deep Impact mission was supposed to end a few weeks later, but NASA approved an extension and renamed the spacecraft
EPOXI and sent it on to
fly by Comet Hartley 2 in November 2010. The probe
stopped communicating with mission managers in September 2013 and was declared lost.
The
Cassini spacecraft ended its mission in 2017. The probe was launched on October 15, 1997, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It arrived at Saturn on June 30, 2004. The spacecraft dropped a
probe called Huygens to the surface of Saturn's moon Titan. It was the first landing on a moon in the outer solar system.
The Stardust spacecraft was launched on February 7, 1999, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. After traveling 3.5 billion miles (5.6 billion kilometers), the spacecraft made history by capturing images of asteroid Annefrank and collecting samples of comet Wild 2 and successfully returning them to Earth. It also took spectacular images of comet Tempel 1. The
probe's mission ended on March 25, 2011, when mission managers put it in safe mode and turned off the transmitter for the last time.
Surveyor 1 was the first U.S. spacecraft to make a soft landing on the Moon. The program ran during the mid-1960s and was declared a success. The program's focus eventually switched to support of the Apollo program.
A model of
Explorer 1, America's first satellite, is held by, from left, NASA official William Pickering, scientist James Van Allen and rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun. The team was gathered at a news conference at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington to announce the satellite's successful launch. It had been launched a few hours before, on January 31, 1958.
Less than two years after Parker's paper was published, his theory of solar wind was confirmed by satellite observations. His work revolutionized our understanding of the sun and interplanetary space.
Parker is now the S. Chandrasekhar Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. Zurbuchen and Nicola Fox, the mission project scientist for Parker Solar Probe, also presented Parker with the first scale model of the probe and NASA's distinguished public service medal.
"I'm greatly honored to be associated with such a heroic scientific space mission," Parker said.
The Parker Solar Probe will carry a chip with photos of Parker and his revolutionary paper, as well as a plate carrying whatever inscription Parker wishes to provide -- his message to the sun.
The probe will eventually orbit within 3.7 million miles of the sun's surface. The observations and data could provide insight about the physics of stars, change what we know about the mysterious corona, increase understanding of solar wind and help improve forecasting of major space weather events. Those events can impact satellites and astronauts as well as the Earth -- including the power grid and radiation exposure on airline flights, NASA said.
The mission's objectives include "tracing the flow of energy that heats and accelerates the sun's corona and solar wind, determining 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."
"We've been inside the orbit of Mercury and done amazing things, but until you go and touch the sun, you can't answer these questions," Fox said. "Why has it taken us 60 years? The materials didn't exist to allow us to do it. We had to make a heat shield, and we love it. Something that can withstand the extreme hot and cold temperature shifts of its 24 orbits is revolutionary."
Solar wind is the flow of charged gases from the sun that is present in most of the solar system. That wind screams past Earth at a million miles per hour, and disturbances of the solar wind cause disruptive space weather that impacts our planet.
Space weather may not sound like something that concerns Earth, but surveys by the National Academy of Sciences have estimated that a solar event without warning could cause $2 trillion in damage in the United States and leave parts of the country without power for a year.
In order to reach an orbit around the sun, the Parker Solar Probe will take seven flybys of Venus that will essentially give the probe a gravity assist, shrinking its orbit around the sun over the course of nearly seven years.
The probe will eventually be closer to the sun than Mercury. It will be close enough to watch solar wind whip up from subsonic to supersonic.
When closest to the sun, the probe's 4½-inch-thick carbon-composite solar shields will have to withstand temperatures close to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Due to its design, the inside of the spacecraft and its instruments will remain at a comfortable room temperature.
The probe will reach a speed of 450,000 mph around the sun. On Earth, this speed would enable someone to get from Philadelphia to Washington in one second, the agency said. The mission will also pass through the origin of the solar particles with the highest energy.
The mission is scheduled to end in June 2025.
"The solar probe is going to a region of space that has never been explored before," Parker said. "It's very exciting that we'll finally get a look. One would like to have some more detailed measurements of what's going on in the solar wind. I'm sure that there will be some surprises. There always are."