Why the sun's atmosphere is nearly 200 times hotter than its visible surface is a long-standing mystery. A new spacecraft, called Solar Probe Plus, aims to find some answers.
Flying directly into the sun's corona is a suicidal mission to be sure, but scientists and engineers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Baltimore, which is developing Solar Probe Plus for NASA, plan to keep the spacecraft alive as long as possible.
It's not going to be easy. For starters, the probe will need to withstand temperatures up to about 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit. Plus, its heat shield can't ablate, or boil away like the shields on capsules returning through Earth's atmosphere are designed to do. That would pollute the particles and measurements Solar Probe Plus is being dispatched to gather.
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