We all share this small blue planet on its annual trips around the Sun. We are all consumed by the knowns of our earthly place, our temporal and territorial, the theatre and its tragedy — yet there are far greater unknowns beyond our earthly boundaries. At night, when we look to the stars, we wonder what lies beyond. And on the morning’s rising of the Sun, we take stock of our day; its new beginning, a new dawn — a resolve that today will be a good day, and tomorrow will be a better one.
For scientists, astrophysicists, researchers and those who embrace space as their palette of universal mystery, the Sun itself is a source of enduring curiosity — our own star, our source of life, a furious furnace of nuclear activity where our understanding of physics may be upended by the solar winds or incinerated by its solar flares. And yes, we trundle together around this star but know precious little of this orbital pivot some 150 million kilometres away.
Right now, Nasa Parker Probe is in the nascent stages of its race to the Sun, launched at the weekend and planned to spend seven years in orbit around the corona, in the words of the US space agency itself, “touching the sun”.
The science behind this probe’s mission is spellbinding — it will travel faster than any man-made object before; enduring temperatures hotter than anything we’ve felt before; soaking up solar radiation as never experienced before.
From the very first days of Greek mythology, we were told of Icarus who yearned to fly and perished by flying too close to the Sun. We should never lose our yearning to learn.
