There's a new spacecraft being designed to study the sun: the Solar Probe Plus, managed by a team at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, or APL. The scientists behind it aim to answer two fundamental questions: why the sun's atmosphere is hotter than its surface, and what's responsible for accelerating solar wind.

Part of NASA's Living With a Star program, which looks to study how the sun, solar system and Earth interact, the Solar Probe Plus would break new ground in science with regard to our central star.

The Solar Probe Plus will be designed to orbit the sun 24 times, getting closer to the star with each orbit. The probe will do something no spacecraft has done yet: approaching it as close as 4 million miles from the surface. (Considering the sun is 93 million miles from Earth, that is indeed "close.")

"Solar Probe Plus will revolutionize our knowledge of the physics of the origin and evolution of the solar wind," Nicky Fox, Solar Probe Plus project scientist at APL, said in a release.
FULL POST