Latest Solar Probe+ Stories

A University of Delaware researcher is helping to design instruments for a robotic space probe that will go where no other has gone before: the sun.William Matthaeus, professor of physics and astronomy at UD, is involved in NASA's Solar Probe Plus project, which is slated to launch by 2018.The unmanned spacecraft, the size of a small car, will plunge directly into the sun's atmosphere to help uncover answers to perplexing mysteries about the fiery ball of plasma at the center of our solar...

NASA has chosen the Naval Research Laboratory's Wide-field Imager to be part of the Solar Probe Plus mission slated for launch no later than 2018. The Solar Probe Plus, a small car-sized spacecraft will plunge directly into the sun's atmosphere approximately four million miles from our star's surface. It will explore a region no other spacecraft ever has encountered in an effort to unlock the sun's biggest mysteries. For decades, scientists have known that the corona, or the outer atmosphere,...

NASA has begun development of a mission to visit and study the sun closer than ever before. The unprecedented project, named Solar Probe Plus, is slated to launch no later than 2018.The small car-sized spacecraft will plunge directly into the sun's atmosphere approximately four million miles from our star's surface. It will explore a region no other spacecraft ever has encountered. NASA has selected five science investigations that will unlock the sun's biggest mysteries."The experiments...

For more than 400 years, astronomers have studied the sun from afar. Now NASA has decided to go there."We are going to visit a living, breathing star for the first time," says program scientist Lika Guhathakurta of NASA Headquarters. "This is an unexplored region of the solar system and the possibilities for discovery are off the charts."The name of the mission is Solar Probe+ (pronounced "Solar Probe plus"). It's a heat-resistant spacecraft designed to plunge...

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory is sending a spacecraft closer to the sun than any probe has ever gone "“ and what it finds could revolutionize what we know about our star and the solar wind that influences everything in our solar system.NASA has tapped APL to develop the ambitious 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...