Name: NASA Is Flying A Spacecraft Into The Sun For The First Time
Uploaded: 2018-08-14T14:00:22.000Z
Duration: 3 min 28 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

- NASA is about to go where no one has gone before: the sun.

That's right, NASA is flying a $1.5-billion spacecraft

into the hottest, most violent object in our solar system,

will come within 3.83 million miles of the solar surface.

one of the sun's most treacherous layers: the corona,

from one to five million degrees Fahrenheit

It turns out the sun poses a major threat

Powerful magnetic fields form near the sun's surface,

where they sometimes spark violent eruptions,

These ejections fire a surge of highly-charged particles

into space that will fry any electronic circuits on impact.

That includes circuits inside our satellites

GPS, the stock exchange, and much, much more.

In 2014, for example, astrophysicist Daniel N. Baker

if one of these powerful storms hit Earth directly,

explaining it "could cause widespread power blackouts,

disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket.

Most people wouldn't even be able to flush their toilet

because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps."

Such a strike could cost an estimated $2 trillion in damage,

which makes Earth a relatively small and tricky target.

In fact, the last time a powerful storm like this

struck our planet was more than 150 years ago, back in 1859.

That's where the Parker Solar Probe comes in.

The probe can't prevent an ejection from happening,

but it can study the corona so that we may better understand

we may be able to protect our satellites from harm.

Parker Solar Probe has another very important job:

with four highly-tuned sensors and an impressive heat shield

that will protect the probe's instruments.

the shield stays directed at the sun at all times.

which are all scheduled to take place through the year 2025.