Parker Solar Probe

The Parker Solar Probe is a NASA spacecraft launched toward the Sun that will make several orbits around the Sun in an attempt to better understand how the Sun works. Last month the spacecraft became the closest spacecraft to the Sun ever at only 15 million miles from the Sun's surface. For comparison, Mercury is about 36 million miles from the Sun. That's pretty cool!

NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Ed Whitman

The more we know about the Sun, the more we can protect ourselves on Earth. The Sun can send out blasts of energy in the form of solar wind particles that can negatively effect communication satellites. Extremely large blasts of energy can potentially cause great damage to electrical grids on Earth, causing wide spread outages for very lengthy periods of time, possibly years. Thus the more we know about the Sun, the better we can prepare on Earth. Hopefully the Parker Solar Probe will be a continued success and help us better understand the Sun.