The Race to the Sun's Surface ｜ Universe ｜ BBC Earth Science

We now stand on the threshold of being able to survive a close encounter with a new heat-resistant probe that's giving us an up-close look at our sun for the first time. Status check. Go Delta. Go PSP. Minus 15. Launch night. I was sick to my stomach. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. Liftoff of the mighty Delta IV Heavy rocket with NASA's Parker Solar Probe. There we go. The Delta IV Heavy is a very slow rocket compared to the other launches I've seen, so I just saw fireballs and was very, very frightened for a while. 25 seconds into flight. It is quite scary to think about all that power in the rocket underneath that, you know, relatively small spacecraft sitting on top. Then realizing that this was all okay as it slowly made its way up into the sky. Now 50 seconds into flight. And we have jettison of both strap-on boosters. Parker is just an exquisite mission. It will be the closest that our species has thus far come to literally touching the sun itself. The Parker Solar Probe is traveling to a place that has been completely unexplored up close. Until now. NASA's Parker Solar Probe. A daring mission to shed light on the mysteries of our closest star. This is a journey into never-never land, you might say. During its seven-year mission, the Parker Solar Probe will attempt a series of dives towards the surface of the sun. Its goal is to understand how the sun sheds its energy, orbiting a total of 24 times, each pass taking it perilously closer. So close it will enter the sun's atmosphere. Braving temperatures no spacecraft has ever endured. And traveling faster than any other human-made object has before. The mission is still in its early days. But in the coming years, the Parker Solar Probe will help us unlock not only the secrets of our own sun, but all stars. Including those that hold the key to the sun's origins. And our own. We can look at the processes, look at what's inside the sun and understand how it had to become that. What were the generations of stars before that? What was its ancestry?