A tool to touch the sun
A scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is leading an effort to design an instrument that would be the first to come directly into contact with the sun’s fiery atmosphere after the device is launched on a NASA probe in 2018. Justin Kasper, a solar scientist at the CfA and a lecturer on astronomy, heads a team designing two instruments that will fly aboard NASA’s Solar Probe Plus as part of a project to investigate the nature of the sun’s atmosphere, or corona. The car-sized spacecraft will carry instruments for four projects three times closer to the sun than any previous spacecraft. After launch, Solar Probe Plus will use a series of close encounters with Venus to put on the brakes and slow before it passes into the sun’s atmosphere. The craft will pass within 4 million miles of the sun’s surface to an area of the corona thought to...