APL to build craft that will touch the sun
Baltimore Sun: NASA has awarded the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab $750 million to develop an Solar Probe mission, which will study the streams of charged particles the sun hurls into space from a vantage point within the sun’s corona – its outer atmosphere – where the processes that heat the corona and produce solar wind occur. At closest approach Solar Probe would zip past the sun at 125 miles per second, protected by a carbon-composite heat shield that must withstand up to 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit and survive blasts of radiation and energized dust at levels not experienced by any previous spacecraft.
Launch is planned for 2015, with the craft's first solar flyby just three months later - thanks to a boost from the sun's gravity.
Launch is planned for 2015, with the craft's first solar flyby just three months later - thanks to a boost from the sun's gravity.
