U awarded grant for a trip to the Sun

The University of Minnesota was awarded a $7 million grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration this week to build a spacecraft component for a 2018 unmanned mission to the sun.

NASA’s Solar Probe Plus project awarded the University the grant.

The $180 million project will bring a spacecraft as close as 4 million miles from the surface of the sun – the closest a human-made object has ever been to the surface.

"This project allows humanity's ingenuity to go where no spacecraft has ever gone before," NASA's SPP program scientist Lika Guhathakurta said in a statement. "For the very first time, we'll be able to touch, taste and smell our sun."

The University will be responsible for constructing an instrument called the Time Domain Sampler, something with which Keith Goetz, College of Science and Engineering’s School of Physics and Astronomy associate program director, is very familiar.

“The Time Domain Sampler is really Keith's expertise,” Cynthia Cattell, University physics professor, said. “It’s something he's built for a number of other missions.”

The spacecraft will fly directly into the sun’s atmosphere, or corona, to try and gain a better understanding of the coronal and solar winds.

“This concept has been kicking around for decades,” Goetz said. Until now, it has not been technologically feasible, he said.

 “They are a lot of technical difficulties in getting that close to the sun,” Cattell said.