When the Parker Solar Probe has completed testing, it will be sent up to the sun's solar atmosphere, or corona, from Launch Complex-37 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida after 4:00 a.m. EST. If it fails to make its two-hour launch window, there will be other launch windows every day until August 19.
You, too, could be a part of this amazing mission: NASA is asking people to submit their names before April 27, promising to put them on a microchip installed directly on the probe. William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk on "Star Trek," is already among those included.
NASA's Parker Solar Probe is the first to be named after a living scientist. Typically, missions are renamed after their launch and certification, but astrophysicist Eugene Parker was given the honor of lending his name to the mission from the get-go for his "important contributions to heliophysics and space science" since the 1950s. Parker coined the term "solar wind" and theorized explanations for the complex and baffling environment inside the solar atmosphere, which affects conditions on Earth and other bodies in our solar system.