By Park Si-soo
NASA will send a robotic spacecraft into the sun's atmosphere next year in unprecedented outer-space exploration to tackle questions linked to the blazing star.
The historic project was announced during a ceremony honoring American solar astrophysicist Eugene Parker, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, Wednesday (local time). The craft was named the Parker Solar Probe.
The spacecraft, wearing a nearly five-inch coat of carbon-composite solar shields, will blast off next summer and fly within 4 million miles of the sun's surface -- into the solar atmosphere. It will be subjected to brutal heat and radiation like no other man-made structure before.
This is NASA's first mission to the sun and its outermost atmosphere, the corona, according to CNN.
"This is the first time NASA has named a spacecraft for a living individual," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, told CNN. "It's a testament to the importance of his body of work, founding a new field of science that also inspired my own research and many important science questions NASA continues to study and further understand every day. I'm very excited to be personally involved honoring a great man and his unprecedented legacy."
According to CNN, Parker published research in 1958 predicting the existence of solar wind, when he was a young professor at the University of Chicago's Enrico Fermi Institute. At the time, astronomers believed the space between planets was a vacuum.
Parker's first paper was rejected, but it was saved by a colleague, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an astrophysicist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics.
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