When NASA was established in 1958, it created a list of missions it hoped to accomplish. The space agency has consistently checked missions off the list, like the Hubble Space Telescope or the Apollo program. But they have not been able to get a close look at the sun to learn more about the source of the Earth’s light and heat, as well as solar storms that could disrupt satellites or fry electric grids. But now, after decades of work, NASA has the technology to protect scientific equipment from the sun’s ferocious rays. The spacecraft, called the Parker Solar Probe, will be launched this summer. It will go through the sun’s atmosphere at a pace of 450,000 mph and will fly within 4 million miles of the sun’s surface — seven times closer than any spacecraft has gone before. The heat shield must sustain blasts of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit while also maintaining the instruments on the other side at roughly room temperature. The Parker Solar Probe was built by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Last week, they began putting the probe through significant trials, including thermal vacuum testing. Over the course of seven weeks, the spacecraft will be inside a 40-foot-tall chamber and will be chilled to -292 degrees to simulate the bitter cold of space, then blasted with heat proportional to what it might start to experience as it approaches the sun, writes The Washington Post. Engineers will test the spacecraft’s hardware as this goes on, and will perform flight simulation under a range of rough conditions.
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