DR. ANGELOS VOURLIDAS

Sunlight feeds life on Earth while the solar wind buffets our magnetosphere, sometimes violently. It is no surprise that solar variability is a primary societal concern and subject of intense scientific research. For decades, however, progress on understanding the Sun-Earth connection has been hampered by the 'disconnected' nature of the observations; remote sensing of the near-Sun corona, in-situ sampling at Earth. The evolution of the solar wind and its more energetic transients in the inner heliosphere was accessible only through modeling. While the STEREO mission made great strides since 2007, the mechanisms of the generation and early evolution of the solar wind still elude us. This is about to change thanks to an unprecedented space mission, the Parker Solar Probe (PSP) launched in August 2018. The mission is designed to attack the solar wind problem head-on by direct sampling of the corona from the inside with a suite of remote sensing and in-situ instruments. In this talk, the speaker will introduce the capabilities and science objectives of the PSP mission and discuss the exciting science prospects in solar physics research in the next 10 years. PSP will be the first spacecraft to enter the atmosphere of a star, reaching within 6 million km from the solar surface. The mission design will tie together in-situ sampling and high contrast imaging from within the solar corona with high resolution observations from space and ground. A new era in solar and space physics awaits us.