Aamer Madhani

USA TODAY

CHICAGO — Next summer’s maiden, unmanned mission to the sun’s atmosphere will travel at 430,000 miles per hour, whipping the distance between New York City and Tokyo in about a minute’s time, NASA scientists said Wednesday.

Details of the "unprecedented" mission to "touch the sun" came as the agency announced it was naming the spacecraft after renowned astrophysicist Eugene Parker, whose work has revolutionized scientists' understanding of the sun.

The probe will use advanced material technologies able to stand up to blistering temperatures of 2,500 degrees fahrenheit as it approaches the outermost part of the sun's atmosphere. It will make critical observations that NASA hopes will answer decades-old questions about how stars work.

"Solar probe is going to be the hottest, fastest mission," joked Nicola Fox, the mission project scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "I like to call it the coolest, hottest mission under the sun."

The mission, now dubbed Parker Solar Probe, will launch in the summer of 2018 and marks the agency's first mission to fly into the sun's atmosphere. The spacecraft will come within 4 million miles of the sun’s surface, facing heat and radiation unlike any man-made object in history, according to NASA.

The data collected is expected to improve forecasting of space weather events that impact life on Earth and astronauts in space.

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It's the first time a NASA probe has been named after a living scientist, said Thomas Zurbuchen, who heads NASA Science Mission Directorate.

"Nature has become more beautiful, more complex” because of Parker’s work, Zurbuchen said. "NASA has named spacecraft after about 20 distinguished researchers ... There's a lot more Nobel Prize winners than than there have been (researchers) who have had spacecraft after them."

In the 1950s, Parker developed the theory of solar wind and predicted the spiral shape of the solar magnetic field in the outer solar system. In his groundbreaking paper, Parker, 89, a University of Chicago professor emeritus, posited that a strong wind blows continuously from the sun, filling local interstellar space with ionized gas. The discovery reshaped how scientists perceive space and had enormous impact in helping scientists understand other phenomena.

Parker said the upcoming mission was a stretch of the imagination when he began his seminal paper, which he recalled faced a great deal of skepticism from colleagues.

"I was simply concentrating on getting the thing published over the dead bodies of the referees," said Parker, who was also honored Wednesday with the NASA distinguished service medal.

NASA set July 31, 2018, for the tentative launch of the probe, which is the culmination of 60 years of work, the agency said. The probe will fly by Venus about eight weeks after launch and make its closest approach about 16 weeks into the mission.

Fox said the probe could allow scientists to understand some basic questions that remain unknown, such as why is the corona hotter than the surface of the sun.

“Being able to explain why the sun's corona behaves the way it does and how the solar wind is formed and how it evolves is really key to putting the most pieces of the puzzle together,” Fox said.