Robotic spacecraft to Sun next year: Nasa

Washington February 28: For the first time NASA is planning to send its first robotic spacecraft to the Sun next year that is slated to get within six million kilometers of the blazing star to probe its atmosphere.

"This is going to be our first mission to fly to the Sun," said Eric Christian, a NASA research scientist at Goddard Space Flight Centre.

"We can't get to the very surface of the Sun," but the mission will get close enough to answer three important questions, Christian said.



According to NASA, the surface temperature of the Sun is only about 5,500 degrees Celsius. However, the atmosphere above it is a sizzling two million degrees Celsius.

"You would think the farther away you get from a heat source, you would get colder. Why the atmosphere is hotter than the surface is a big puzzle," Christian said.

"The Sun blows a stream of charged particles in all directions at a million miles an hour. But we do not understand how that gets accelerated," he said.