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. “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. 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. 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. “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. 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. 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?
NASA launches the Parker Solar Probe, an unpiloted spacecraft designed to study the sun.