Washington: NASA plans to send its first robotic spacecraft to the Sun next year that is slated to get within six million kilometres of the blazing star to probe its atmosphere.Humans have sent spacecraft to the Moon, Mars and even distant interstellar space. Now, NASA plans to launch the Solar Probe Plus mission to the Sun which is about 149 million kilometres from the Earth.“This is going to be our first mission to fly to the Sun,” said Eric Christian, a NASA research scientist at Goddard Space Flight Centre.“We can’t get to the very surface of the Sun,” but the mission will get close enough to answer three important questions, Christian said.
First, the mission will hopefully unveil why the surface of the Sun, called the photosphere, is not as hot as its atmosphere, called the corona.According to NASA, the surface temperature of the Sun is only about 5,500 degrees Celsius. However, the atmosphere above it is a sizzling two million degrees Celsius.“You would think the farther away you get from a heat source, you would get colder. Why the atmosphere is hotter than the surface is a big puzzle,” Christian said.
