Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The Parker Solar Probe spacecraft takes off on its mission to the Sun

US space agency Nasa has launched its mission to send a satellite closer to the Sun than any before.

The Parker Solar Probe rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The probe is set to become the fastest-moving manmade object in history. Its data promises to crack longstanding mysteries about the Sun's behaviour.

It is the first space craft to be named after a living person - astrophysicist Eugene Parker, 91, who first described solar wind in 1958.

"Wow, here we go! We're in for some learning over the next several years," he said after watching the lift-off from the scene. The University of Chicago professor said he had been biting his nails in anticipation.

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Astrophysicist Dr Eugene Parker with a model of the Parker Solar Probe that he inspired

The Delta-IV Heavy rocket - which was carrying the probe - launched at 03:31 local time (07:31 GMT).

It came after a failed attempt the previous day, when a last-minute alarm caused the agency to miss its 65-minute window.

Just under an hour after the launch, Nasa confirmed that the spacecraft had successfully separated and the probe had been released into space.

What will the probe do?

The probe aims to dip directly into our star's outer atmosphere, or corona.

It will zip past Venus in six weeks and make a first rendezvous with the Sun a further six weeks after that.

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Parker Solar Probe: How Nasa is trying to 'touch' the Sun

Over the course of seven years, Parker will make 24 loops around our star to study the physics of the corona, the place where much of the important activity that affects the Earth seems to originate.

The probe will dip inside this tenuous atmosphere, sampling conditions, and getting to just 6.16 million km (3.83 million miles) from the Sun's broiling "surface".

"I realise that might not sound that close, but imagine the Sun and the Earth were a metre apart. Parker Solar Probe would be just 4cm away from the Sun," explained Dr Nicky Fox, the UK-born project scientist who is affiliated to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

"It will also be the fastest man-made object ever, travelling at speeds of up to 430,000mph [690,000km/h] - New York to Tokyo in under a minute!" she told BBC News.</s>CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Embarking on a mission that scientists have been dreaming of since the Sputnik era, a NASA spacecraft hurtled Sunday toward the sun on a quest to unlock some of its mysteries by getting closer than any object sent before.

If all goes well, the Parker Solar Probe will fly straight through the wispy edges of the sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, in November. In the years ahead, it will gradually get within 3.8 million (6 million kilometers) of the surface, its instruments protected from the extreme heat and radiation by a revolutionary new carbon heat shield and other high-tech wizardry.

Altogether, the Parker probe will make 24 close approaches to our star during the seven-year, $1.5 billion journey.

“Wow, here we go. We’re in for some learning over the next several years,” said Eugene Parker, the 91-year-old astrophysicist for whom the spacecraft is named.

It was Parker who accurately theorized 60 years ago the existence of solar wind - the supersonic stream of charged particles blasting off the sun and coursing through space, sometimes wreaking havoc on electrical systems on Earth.

This is the first time NASA has named a spacecraft after a living person.

As Parker and thousands of others watched, a Delta IV Heavy rocket carried the probe aloft, thundering into the clear, star-studded sky on three pillars of fire that lit up the middle-of-the-night darkness.

NASA needed the mighty 23-story rocket, plus a third stage, to get the Parker probe - the size of a small car and well under a ton - racing toward the sun, 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from Earth.

A Saturday morning launch attempt was foiled by last-minute technical trouble. But Sunday gave way to complete success.

It was the first rocket launch ever witnessed by Parker, a retired University of Chicago professor. He said it was like looking at photos of the Taj Mahal for years and then beholding the real thing in India.

“I really have to turn from biting my nails in getting it launched, to thinking about all the interesting things which I don’t know yet and which will be made clear, I assume, over the next five or six or seven years,” Parker said on NASA TV.

Among the mysteries scientists hope to solve: Why is the corona hundreds of times hotter than the surface, which is 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius)? And why is the sun’s atmosphere continually expanding and accelerating, as Parker theorized in 1958?

“The only way we can do that is to finally go up and touch the sun,” said project scientist Nicola Fox of Johns Hopkins University. “We’ve looked at it. We’ve studied it from missions that are close in, even as close as the planet Mercury. But we have to go there.”

A better understanding of the sun’s life-giving and sometimes violent nature could also enable earthlings to better protect satellites and astronauts in orbit, along with the power grids so vital to today’s technology-dependent society, said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s science mission chief.

Parker, the probe, will start shattering records this fall. On its very first brush with the sun, it will come within 15.5 million miles (25 million kilometers), easily beating the current record of 27 million miles (43 million kilometers) set by NASA’s Helios 2 spacecraft in 1976.

By the time Parker gets to its 22nd, 23rd and 24th orbits of the sun in 2024 and 2025, it will be even deeper into the corona and traveling at a record 430,000 mph (690,000 kilometers per hour). Nothing from planet Earth has ever gone that fast.

Even Fox has difficulty comprehending the mission’s derring-do.

“To me, it’s still mind-blowing,” she said. “Even I still go, ‘Really? We’re doing that?’”

The 8-foot (2.4-meter) heat shield will serve as an umbrella that will shade the spacecraft’s scientific instruments, with on-board sensors adjusting the protective cover as necessary so that nothing gets fried. The shield is capable of withstanding 2,500 degrees F (1,370 degrees C).

A mission to get up close and personal with our star has been on NASA’s books since 1958. The trick was making the spacecraft compact and light enough to travel at incredible speeds and durable enough to withstand the punishing environment.

“We’ve had to wait so long for our technology to catch up with our dreams,” Fox said.</s>NASA has successfully launched a spacecraft destined to become the fastest man-made object ever as it gets closer to the sun than we've been before.

Originally slated to fly in the small hours of Saturday morning, the Parker Solar Probe blasted off Sunday from Florida's Kennedy Space Center at 03:31 am EDT / 00:31 PT / 8.31 UMT. The probe was borne into the heavens atop a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket.

Within three minutes of taking off, the rocket was 33 miles up travelling at 4,500 miles per hour, and weighed half of what it did at launch, burning fuel at a rate of 5,000lbs per second.

The probe's destination is the sun's corona, which it will fly through over two dozen times, eventually coming within less than 4 million miles (6.4 million kilometers) of our star's surface. That's around 4 per cent of the distance between the earth and the sun. Along the way, the spacecraft will gather data to try and solve some of the sun's great mysteries. Scientists aim to learn more about the mechanisms that power the solar wind of charged particles the sun sends into the solar system, creating aurorae on Earth and sometimes screwing with our tech.

Instruments on board may also help to explain why the corona is hotter than the sun's surface by several orders of magnitude. Perhaps most important for us humans, the science undertaken with the help of the Parker Solar Probe will likely improve our ability to forecast space weather -- including solar flares that can disrupt signals from satellites and, in extreme cases, can even blow out transformers on our terrestrial power grids.

The probe is the first NASA spacecraft with a living namesake. Eugene Parker is a University of Chicago professor emeritus in physics who first proposed the concept of the solar wind. His 1958 paper was initially ridiculed but has come to be central to our understanding of the solar system and beyond.

To "touch" the sun, the spacecraft will make a swing by Venus to shed some of its sideways momentum, allowing it to take a more straight shot toward the center of the solar system. The extreme pull of the sun's gravity will then accelerate the probe up to insane speeds of as much as 430,000 miles per hour (700,000 km/h) as it grazes the edge of the most powerful object in our corner of the galaxy.

At those speeds, the spacecraft will reach the sun by November, and scientists hope to have early data back from the probe by the end of the year.

The Smartest Stuff: Innovators are thinking up new ways to make you, and the things around you, smarter.</s>iStock/Thinkstock(LAUREL, Md.) — NASA has launched a mission to get closer than its ever gotten before to the sun, its corona and solar wind. After a 24-hour delay, the mission, called Parker Solar Probe, launched early Sunday.

Here is what you need to know about the Parker Solar Probe.



What is Parker Solar Probe (PSP)?

PSP is the only NASA mission, scientific probe to study the sun’s corona and solar wind. The mission is named for Dr. Eugene Parker, a physicist at the University of Chicago who proposed the existence of solar wind. It is the first NASA mission to be named for a living researcher.

This mission is the brainchild of Parker, who long ago predicted the turbulence of solar energy and its impact on our planet. At a press conference last week, Parker said of his namesake mission: “I expect to find some surprises.”



How does the probe work?



It will be the fastest human-made object with speeds up to 430,000 miles per hour, able to survive million degree temperatures, orbiting the sun just 4 million miles from its surface, after a 90 million-mile trip, to get the first measurements of the sun’s energy.



What are the challenges in this mission?

The temperature near the sun’s corona can be viewed as an obstacle, according to Geoffrey Brown, a public affair officer with the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.

“The spacecraft must operate in the sun’s corona, where temperatures can reach millions of degrees,” Brown told ABC News via email. “To protect itself, the spacecraft has a thermal protection system, or heat shield, that will provide a shadow in which the spacecraft will ‘hide’ to perform its scientific data gathering. The outer sun-facing side of the shield will reach 2,500 Fahrenheit at closest approach to the sun.”



What does Parker Solar Probe mean for humanity?

“The mission will unlock mysteries of the corona, including why it’s so much hotter than the surface of the sun which is about 10,000 Farenheit,” Brown said.

How close can you get to the sun without being burned?

Parker Solar Probe will find out if its cutting edge heat shields will work — this death-defying spacecraft will fly daringly close to the sun — closer than any spacecraft before it. Just imagine how sizzling hot it is even without the advanced heat protection that will keep this tiny space probe from burning to a crisp.



Why is the mission important?

This mission is exciting because never before have we had the opportunity to get this close to the sun. Solar weather isn’t something most of us are aware of — not like approaching thunderstorms or blizzards or tornadoes — but it impacts our technology, our satellites, the electric grid and our communications networks.

Also, astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi says this is one of NASA’s most exciting missions.

“We need to get an up-close view to see this solar processes, to improve our understanding of how the sun works,” Oluseyi said. “This will help us understand how stars interact with [the] planets that orbit them and may give rise to new technologies.”

David Alexander, director of Rice University’s Space Program, says you cannot overestimate the importance of this mission.

“It will help us understand a fundamental aspect of the sun-Earth interaction, the solar wind,” Alexander said.

When will the Parker Solar Probe be launched?

The launch was scheduled for Saturday, but technical glitches meant it didn’t lift off until 3:31 a.m. ET Sunday from Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It was launched on a Delta IV Heavy rocket.

The Parker Solar Probe launch was delayed several times already, but needed to launch by Aug. 19 to line up flyby of Venus, which will act as a slingshot to get PSP into the right trajectory away from Earth toward the sun, for its seven-year mission, orbiting the sun seven times.



How long will the whole mission last?



“The mission is slated for a seven-year primary mission,” Brown said.

What is Johns Hopkins’ role in the Parker Solar Probe?



“The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) designed, built, and will manage the mission for NASA,” Brown said. “APL will operate the spacecraft from a mission operations center on APL’s campus in Laurel, Maryland.”</s>It was dark on Earth when NASA’s Parker Solar Probe launched on its journey to endless day. The first spacecraft designed to swoop by a star took flight from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 3:31 EDT Sunday morning. A roaring Delta IV Heavy rocket carried the probe out of Earth’s atmosphere. Next stop: A loop past Venus to rendezvous with the sun.

The source of all light and life on Earth is also the source of one of its biggest natural threats: space weather. The sun’s atmosphere regularly erupts with fast-moving flashes of protons and explosions of energetic particles that can hit Earth within minutes and disrupt radio communication, interfere with GPS, and fry the electric grid. A “worst-case scenario” space weather event could cause more damage than Hurricanes Katrina, Harvey and Sandy combined.

“It sounds like science fiction,” said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologist William Murtagh, who heads the Space Weather Prediction Center. “But it’s something that’s not only possible but very likely to happen in the not-too-distant future.”

Scientists have long struggled to understand and predict space weather events, because the ferocious environment around the sun makes them difficult to witness as they form.

Murtagh and scores of other researchers watched as NASA’s newest spacecraft embarked on a mission that should take it closer to the sun than any human-made object has gone before.

The probe is the culmination of a half-century effort to understand our star, Murtagh says, and it may help us prepare for the hazards the sun may throw at us in the future.

Part of the sun erupted on Sept. 1, 1859. English astronomer Richard Carrington noticed a brilliant white solar flare on the sun, brighter than the sunspots he usually observed. Roughly a day later, a blast of charged particles – known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME – arrived at Earth, jostling the planet’s magnetic bubble. People as far south as Cuba saw the sky light up with auroras. Geomagnetic currents sent surges of electricity through copper telegraph wires, zapping operators and setting telegraph paper aflame.

If a similar event happened today, it would bring life as we know it to a halt.

The energetic particles within a coronal mass ejection can penetrate the walls of spacecraft and pose a radiation risk to astronauts and the technology they depend on. They can interfere with satellites, disrupting radio communication and GPS. And if a CME hits our planet’s magnetosphere at the right angle, it can generate powerful waves of electricity within the Earth. These may then infiltrate utility grids and blow out transformers that provide electricity – like tripping a circuit on a massive scale.

The sun exploded again in July 2012, spewing material toward Earth at nearly 6 million miles per hour. This time the coronal mass ejection hit a NASA spacecraft called STEREO-A at full-blast. The spacecraft’s sensors were stressed, but they still managed to measure the solar particles, gusts of solar wind and the strength of the interplanetary magnetic field.

A year after the explosion, in a paper published in the journal Space Weather, astrophysicists examined the STEREO-A data to answer a worst-case question. “What if that coronal mass ejection had occurred 10 days earlier, when the Earth was in the line of fire?” said Daniel Baker, a professor of planetary and space physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and one of the authors of the study.

Their conclusion: If it had hit Earth, Baker and his colleagues wrote, there was a “very legitimate question of whether our society would still be ‘picking up the pieces.'”

In 2008, a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report on the economic and societal impacts of space weather came up with a worst-case estimate for an extreme geomagnetic storm: It could cost North America up to $2 trillion in the first year, and recovery would take four to 10 years.

It’s said that space weather science lags about 50 years behind terrestrial weather forecasting. Meteorologists know what conditions cause hurricanes, and they can spot the seeds of a storm brewing over the ocean long before it makes landfall.

But warning times for space weather events are often measured in minutes, Murtagh said, and there is too much we do not know.

“There’s a lack of understanding,” Murtagh said. “It’s science. It’s knowledge of the sun and the physical processes that are likely to produce those energetic particles. We just don’t fully understand the science yet.”

Much of our modern understanding of the sun stems from 91-year-old Eugene Parker, for whom NASA’s new probe is named.

In the mid-1950s, Parker discovered a link between two seemingly unrelated space mysteries. First, bizarrely, the corona, or atmosphere of the sun, is hotter than its surface – scientists liken the sun to a campfire that feels hotter the further one stands from the flames. And second, the dusty tails of comets always point away from the sun, as if blasted by a powerful wind.

Parker realized the corona is not a static halo, but a stream of material from the sun itself. It starts slow and dense and zooms up as it escapes the sun’s gravity, eventually exceeding the speed of sound. The pointed tails of comets behave like windsocks caught in the solar wind.

The acceleration of the particles in the solar wind remains one of the “fundamental mysteries of the sun,” said Nicola Fox, a heliophysicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the project scientist for Parker Solar Probe. And it is one of the keys to understanding CMEs – the blasts that pose so much danger to life on Earth.

After the National Academies released its sobering 2008 report, “awareness, both at government and in the public, for this hazard really came to the fore,” said a Federal Emergency Management Agency official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Trillion-dollar space storms are a rare issue that rallies Republicans and Democrats alike. The Obama administration’s executive order 13744 created a national space weather policy in 2016. FEMA recently finished drafting a federal operations plan for space weather that was sent to the Trump administration for approval. Congress is also considering legislation directing funds toward developing a space weather plan.

The issue is particularly pressing for the East Coast of the United States between Washington and Maine, not only because of the extensive electric infrastructure in this region. The very ground beneath our feet makes us vulnerable, Murtagh said. The 300 million-year-old igneous rock on which the Eastern Seaboard is perched does not conduct electricity well. If a current strikes this rock, it will seek an easier path – like metal pipes, telephone wires and electric cables. Eventually, the current can hit high-voltage transformers, the spine of the power grid, and overwhelm their magnetic cores.

This is not idle speculation. It happened, on a relatively small scale, in Canada in 1989. The sun belched out a gas cloud in early March that cut off radio signals. (At first, some observers suspected Soviet, not solar, interference.) Electrical currents buzzed through the ground and flooded into the Hydro-Québec power plant. Six million people in Québec were without power for nine hours. Glancing effects were felt as far away as New Jersey, where the electrical surge roasted a transformer at the Salem Nuclear Power Plant.

Industry reports suggest operators would have enough time to shut down the grid before it suffered permanent damage. But others are not as optimistic.

“We’re not going to know until a real event happens whether or not that’s a true statement,” said the FEMA official, who added power utility engineers “won’t say this publicly,” but they have been stocking up on spare transformers where they can. Installing new transformers – which would have to be built overseas – might take one or two years.

That a future solar storm will blast Earth is not a question of if, but when. In 2012, Peter Riley, who studies the sun’s corona at Predictive Science Inc., a San Diego-based company that develops computer models of the sun, published an article in Space Weather that calculated the odds of a Carrington-scale repeat. Within the next decade, he concluded, it could be about 12 percent – on par with the risk of other 100-year hazards, like massive floods.

Over the next seven years, the Parker Solar Probe will embark on a series of 24 egg-shaped orbits around the sun, repeatedly swinging past Venus to reorient itself. Each close approach will shoot it through the corona at a breathtaking 450,000 miles per hour – fast enough to get from Washington to New York in about a second. With its dust detectors, particle counters, and a telescope that can take 3-D images of the corona, the probe will measure the sun’s electric and magnetic fields, scoop particles from the solar wind for sampling and watch as shocks travel out from the sun’s surface, through the atmosphere and into space.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that measurements from probe and our understanding is going to have a huge impact on our ability to predict space weather,” said Christina Cohen, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology’s Space Radiation Lab who studies energetic particles.

It is a project scientists have dreamed about for roughly as long as they have known about the solar wind. But it took half a century to develop the necessary technology. When the spacecraft makes its first close approach in November, a carbon-composite heat shield will be all that protects the minivan-sized Parker Solar Probe from the million-mile-wide ball of hot gas.

Parker was interviewed on NASA-TV shortly after witnessing the launch of the probe that bears his name. “All I can say is, wow, here we go,” he said. “We’re in for some learning over the next several years.”</s>Some scientists scoffed at University of Chicago physicist Eugene Parker’s 1958 paper proposing the existence of a solar wind — a constant stream of particles flowing out from the sun that permeates the entire solar system.

Spacecraft quickly proved him right, and 60 years later, Parker looked on early Sunday as a NASA probe bearing his name rocketed from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on a $1.5 billion mission to “touch” the sun and solve some of its persisting mysteries.

“All I have to say is, wow, here we go,” said Parker, 91, after the launch he watched from Kennedy Space Center. “We’re in for some learning over the next several years.”

On its second attempt, the Parker Solar Probe — NASA’s first mission named for a living person — rumbled from the Space Coast at 3:31 a.m. Sunday atop one of the most powerful American rockets, United Launch Alliance’s 233-foot Delta IV Heavy.

A trio of first-stage boosters fired hydrogen-fueled engines to light up the night sky above Launch Complex 37, unleashing 2.1 million pounds of thrust to begin the probe’s seven-year mission.

A second rocket stage fired and then an extra third stage provided the final kick needed to hurtle the relatively small, 1,400-pound spacecraft out of Earth’s orbit and toward the sun, releasing it 43 minutes after liftoff.

"It went off like clockwork," said Omar Baez, the mission's NASA launch manager, said of Sunday's countdown and launch. "The energy of that (launch) vehicle, the immense size, and when you realize how tiny the Parker Solar Probe satellite is, and you have this big vehicle around it, it’s just mind boggling."

In six weeks, the probe will use the first of seven flybys of Venus to perform the equivalent of a handbrake turn to fine-tune its trajectory. That will set up the first of 24 petal-shaped orbits around Earth's nearest star within a few months.

The first pass 15 million miles from the sun’s surface will already be the closest by any spacecraft, a distance that will close to within 3.8 million miles by the closest approaches through the sun’s super-heated outer atmosphere, or corona.

“While we have many missions dedicated to studying the sun from afar, we have never, ever had a mission to get this up close and personal,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

Parker’s equations predicted the solar wind, but six decades later, scientists can’t precisely explain the physics driving its acceleration or the corona’s extreme heating.

The corona, visible from Earth during last year’s total solar eclipse as a fiery glow around the sun with wispy bands stretching outward, is far hotter than the roiling surface below it.

“We’re used to the idea that if I am standing next to a campfire, and I walk away from it, it gets cooler,” said Alex Young, a solar scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. “But this is not what happens on the sun. As we go from the surface of the sun, which is 10,000 degrees, and quickly move up into corona, we find ourselves quickly at millions of degrees.”

It’s also unknown what causes the solar wind to accelerate from a steady breeze to a supersonic flow, or what sparks violent solar storms that eject blobs of material at millions of miles per hour.

Theories have proposed waves and nanoflares, or a combination of them.

Pinning down those processes will advance understanding of how all stars work. It could also improve predictions of so-called space weather, which can damage satellites, endanger astronauts and disrupt power grids on Earth.

“It’s of fundamental importance for us to be able to predict space weather much like we predict weather here on Earth,” said Young.

The Parker Solar Probe is equipped with four instrument suites to measure plasma, magnetic and electrical fields and energetic particles, and to image the regions the spacecraft is about to fly through.

The probe will charge into the sun’s corona behind what engineers have nicknamed its “Eight-Foot Frisbee” — a heat shield measuring eight feet across and just four-and-a-half inches thick.

Consisting of two layers of carbon-carbon composite sandwiched around carbon foam, the front of the shield, coated with white ceramic paint, will withstand temperatures up to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. In the Frisbee’s shadow, the spacecraft’s body and most of its instruments will stay a comfortable 85 degrees.

How can the spacecraft survive in a region reaching millions of degrees?

“The corona is very tenuous plasma,” said Nicola Fox, the mission’s project scientist from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Baltimore. “If you think of putting your oven on and you set it at 400 degrees, and you can put your hand inside your oven and you won’t get burned unless you actually touch a surface. And it really is the same.”

But the Parker Solar Probe features multiple technologies to cope with the heat threat. It's the first spacecraft to actively cool solar array wings that are critical to generating power, and onboard sensors will react if any sensitive areas are exposed to excessive heat, commanding the probe to adjust its position.

Such automation is needed because sunlight takes eight minutes to reach Earth 93 million miles away. There’s not enough time for engineers to receive signals, process them and return instructions before a problem could prove catastrophic.

“She has to be able to look after herself,” Fox said of the probe.

By the time of its closest approach to the sun’s surface, the Parker Solar Probe will be traveling at 430,000 mph, making it the fastest human-made object ever.

Mission scientists credited Eugene Parker with being the father of their field, heliophysics, calling him a superstar whose work underpins all of the mission’s objectives.

Parker said he’s particularly interested in learning more about the heating that occurs during explosive solar flares and storms.

“I suspect it’s going to be complicated, and I suspect some of us will argue with each other as to exactly what’s going on,” he said before the launch. “But you’ve got data to work with, and you have a chance of getting it straightened out.”

Sunday's flight of his namesake mission was the first rocket launch Parker had seen in person, an experience he likened to seeing the Taj Mahal up close rather than in pictures or on TV.

"Somehow when you’re looking at the real thing, it’s quite impressive," he told NASA TV.

Sunday’s mission was United Launch Alliance’s sixth of the year, and the third countdown in less than six days on the Eastern Range, starting with SpaceX’s early Aug. 7 launch of an Indonesian satellite.

SpaceX is expected to shoot for its 16th launch of the year in the next two weeks, with a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Canadian communications satellite.</s>A NASA spacecraft zoomed toward the sun Sunday on an unprecedented quest to get closer to our star than anything ever sent before.

As soon as this fall, the Parker Solar Probe will fly straight through the wispy edges of the sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, that was visible during last August’s total solar eclipse. It eventually will get within 3.8 million (6 million kilometres) of the surface in the years ahead, staying comfortably cool despite the extreme heat and radiation, and allowing scientists to vicariously explore the sun in a way never before possible.

No wonder scientists consider it the coolest, hottest mission under the sun, and what better day to launch to the sun than Sunday as NASA noted.

“We’re in for some learning over the next several years,” said Eugene Parker, the 91-year-old astrophysicist for whom the spacecraft is named.

Protected by a revolutionary new carbon heat shield and other high-tech wonders, the spacecraft will zip past Venus in October. That will set up the first solar encounter in November.

Altogether, the Parker probe will make 24 close approaches to the sun on the seven-year, $1.5 billion undertaking.

READ MORE: NASA is gearing up to ‘touch the sun’ with a robotic spacecraft the size of a small car

For the second straight day, thousands of spectators jammed the launch site in the middle of the night as well as surrounding towns, including Parker and his family. He proposed the existence of solar wind – a steady, supersonic stream of particles blasting off the sun – 60 years ago.

It was the first time NASA named a spacecraft after someone still alive, and Parker wasn’t about to let it take off without him. Saturday morning’s launch attempt was foiled by last-minute technical trouble. But Sunday gave way to complete success.

READ MORE: NASA’s rover finds more evidence that life on Mars may be possible

The Delta IV Heavy rocket thundered into the pre-dawn darkness, thrilling onlookers for miles around as it climbed through a clear, star-studded sky. NASA needed the mighty 23-story rocket, plus a third stage, to get the diminutive Parker probe – the size of a small car and well under a ton – racing toward the sun.

From Earth, it is 93 million miles (150 million kilometres) to the sun, and the Parker probe will be within 4 per cent of that distance at its closest. That will be seven times closer than previous spacecraft.

WATCH: A NASA space probe is set to launch with the aim of giving us the closest look ever at the sun. As Eric Sorensen reports, the journey the Parker Solar Space probe will undertake is a technical feat to match the mysteries it aims to solve.

It was the first rocket launch ever witnessed by Parker, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. He came away impressed, saying it was like looking at the Taj Mahal for years in photos and then beholding “the real thing” in India.

NASA’s science mission chief, Thomas Zurbuchen, was thrilled not only with the launch, but Parker’s presence.

“I’m in awe,” Zurbuchen said. “What a milestone. Also what’s so cool is hanging out with Parker during all this and seeing his emotion, too.”

READ MORE: Quebec scientists preparing medical database for astronauts heading to Mars

Parker, the probe, will start shattering records this fall. On its very first brush with the sun, it will come within 15.5 million miles (25 million kilometres), easily beating the current record of 27 million miles (43 million kilometres) set by NASA’s Helios 2 spacecraft in 1976. Zurbuchen expects the data from even this early stage to yield top science papers.

By the time Parker gets to its 22nd, 23rd and 24th orbits of the sun in 2024 and 2025, it will be even deeper into the corona and travelling at a record-breaking 430,000 mph (690,000 kilometres per hour).

Nothing from Planet Earth has ever hit that kind of speed.

Even Fox has difficulty comprehending the mission’s derring-do.

Zurbuchen considers the sun the most important star in our universe – it’s ours, after all – and so this is one of NASA’s big-time strategic missions. By better understanding the sun’s life-giving and sometimes violent nature, Earthlings can better protect satellites and astronauts in orbit, and power grids on the ground, he noted. In today’s tech-dependent society, everyone stands to benefit.

With this first-of-its-kind stellar mission, scientists hope to unlock the many mysteries of the sun, a commonplace yellow dwarf star around 4.5 billion years old. Among the puzzlers: Why is the corona hundreds of times hotter than the surface of the sun and why is the sun’s atmosphere continually expanding and accelerating, as Parker accurately predicted in 1958?

“The only way we can do that is to finally go up and touch the sun,” Fox said.

The spacecraft’s heat shield will serve as an umbrella, shading the science instruments during the close, critical solar junctures. Sensors on the spacecraft will make certain the heat shield faces the sun at the right times. If there’s any tilting, the spacecraft will correct itself so nothing gets fried. With a communication lag time of 16 minutes, the spacecraft must fend for itself at the sun. The Johns Hopkins flight controllers in Laurel, Maryland, will be too far away to help.

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A mission to get close up and personal with our star has been on NASA’s books since 1958. The trick was making the spacecraft small, compact and light enough to travel at incredible speeds, while surviving the sun’s punishing environment and the extreme change in temperature when the spacecraft is out near Venus.

“We’ve had to wait so long for our technology to catch up with our dreams,” Fox said. “It’s incredible to be standing here today.”

More than 1 million names are aboard the spacecraft, submitted last spring by space enthusiasts, as well as photos of Parker, the man, and a copy of his 1958 landmark paper on solar wind.

“I’ll bet you 10 bucks it works,” Parker said.</s>Miami, Aug 12 (IANS) NASA on Sunday successfully launched the Parker Solar Probe, the US space agency's historic small car-size probe to "touch the Sun," from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.



"3-2-1... and we have liftoff of Parker #SolarProbe atop @ULAlaunch's #DeltaIV Heavy rocket," the US-based space agency tweeted.



The launch was initially planned for Saturday morning.



The probe is named after Eugene Parker, a solar physicist, who in 1958 first predicted the existence of the solar wind, a stream of charged particles and magnetic fields that flow continuously from the sun. 



Nestled atop a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy -- one of the world's most powerful rockets -- with a third stage added, Parker Solar Probe will blasted off toward the sun with a whopping 55 times more energy than was required to reach Mars. 



Weighing just 635 kgs, it is a relatively light spacecraft, Andy Driesman, project manager for the mission at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in the US, said in an earlier statement.



Zooming through space in a highly elliptical orbit, the Parker Solar Probe will reach speeds of up to 700,000 kms per hour, setting the record for the fastest spacecraft in history. 



During its nominal mission lifetime of just under seven years, the Parker Solar Probe will complete 24 orbits of the Sun -- reaching within 3.8 million miles of the Sun's surface at the closest approach.



In an orbit this close to the Sun, the real challenge is to keep the spacecraft from burning up.



--IANS



vc/ksk/sed</s>CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA has launched a spacecraft to the sun that will fly closer to our star than anything ever sent before.

The Parker Solar Probe rocketed away from Cape Canaveral, Florida, early Sunday. It’s on an unprecedented quest that will take it straight through the wispy edges of the corona, or outer solar atmosphere, just 3.8 million (6 million kilometers) from the sun’s surface.

Protected by a revolutionary new heat shield, the spacecraft will fly past Venus in October. That will set up the first solar encounter in November. Altogether, it will make 24 close approaches over the next seven years.

Thousands of spectators jammed the launch site, including 91-year-old astrophysicist Eugene Parker for whom the spacecraft is named. He proposed the existence of the solar wind 60 years ago.

Saturday’s launch countdown was halted with just one-minute, 55 seconds remaining, keeping the Delta IV (four) rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida, with the Parker Solar Probe. This followed earlier trouble in the countdown.</s>NASA on Sunday launched a probe that will head closer to the Sun than any other spacecraft before it. The Parker Solar Probe will endure wicked heat while zooming through the solar corona to study this outermost part of the stellar atmosphere that gives rise to the solar wind.

The Probe, a robotic spacecraft the size of a small car, was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida, for its planned seven-year mission. It is set to fly into the Sun’s corona within 3.8 million miles or 6.1 million km from the solar surface, seven times closer than any other spacecraft.

The previous closest pass to the Sun was by a probe called Helios 2, which in 1976 came within 27 million miles or 43 million km. The average distance from the Sun for Earth is 93 million miles or 150 million km.

The corona gives rise to the solar wind, a continuous flow of charged particles that permeates the solar system.

Unpredictable solar winds cause disturbances in our planet’s magnetic field and can play havoc with communications technology on Earth. NASA hopes the findings will enable scientists to forecast changes in Earth’s space environment.

The project, with a $1.5 billion price tag, is the first major mission under NASA’s Living With a Star programme.

The probe is set to use seven Venus flybys over nearly seven years to steadily reduce its orbit around the Sun, using instruments designed to image the solar wind and study electric and magnetic fields, coronal plasma and energetic particles.

NASA aims to collect data about the inner workings of the highly magnetized corona. The probe, named after American solar astrophysicist Eugene Newman Parker, will have to survive difficult heat and radiation conditions.

It has been outfitted with a heat shield designed to keep its instruments at a tolerable 85 degrees Fahrenheit or 29 degrees Celsius even as the spacecraft faces temperatures reaching nearly 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit or 1,370 degrees Celsius at its closest pass.
NASA launches the Parker Solar Probe, an unpiloted spacecraft designed to study the sun.