Brilliant 10: Sun Diver
Flying a heat-resistant probe near the sun will reveal the physics of solar plasma In July 2010, a colleague rushed into Justin Kasper's office at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He showed Kasper a telescope video of something they had never seen before: a comet crashing into the sun. The sight was amazing. But what grabbed Kasper's attention was the moment before impact, when a surprising cloud puff indicated that the comet had hit unobserved material. To answer, among other questions, what caused the cloud puff, Kasper is designing an instrument that will get closer to the sun than ever before. The Solar Probe Cup will scoop up bits of the sun's corona and solar wind to continuously measure its speed, temperature and density. That information will help astrophysicists investigate why the corona's plasma gets so hot-it can reach a million degrees-and how the plasma turns into a millionmile-per-hour...