SHOCKING!!! See where NASA's next mission is

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        NASA has visited some awfully impressive places in the past 60 years, so it's something of a wonder that the space agency hasn't found its way to the sun by now. The New Horizons probe, which flew by Pluto in the summer of 2015, is now 3.5 billion miles (5.6 billion km) away; Voyager 1, launched in 1977, has left the solar system entirely, cruising through space at a remove of 11.7 billion miles (18.9 billion km) from Earth.

              The sun, meantime, is within arms' reach by cosmic standards, just 93 million miles (150 million km) away. And while it takes a lot of triangulating to get to Pluto, the sun is kind of hard to miss. Just point and shoot.The problem of course, is that the sun is also — no surprise here — exceedingly hot. Temperatures in the corona — the blistering storm of plasma that stretches millions of miles into space and pops into view during a solar eclipse — approach 1 million degrees F (553,000° C). There's a reason that the nearest any spacecraft has gotten to the solar inferno was 27 million miles (43 million km), a comparative close brush achieved by the Helios 2 spacecraft in 1976.

            Now, however, NASA plans to get closer — a whole lot closer. At a press conference on May 31, NASA will officially announce the details and the launch date for the Solar Probe Plus spacecraft, a ship that will leave Earth next summer, sometime in a 20-day window from July 31 to Aug. 19, 2018. (Watch the live stream of the press conference on Time.com.)

            There is a lot that makes the planned mission extraordinary. Its extremely close approach to the sun, a planned distance of 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km), will take it within the corona and mark the first time a human-built machine has ever technically touched a star. That contact will not just be a one-time thing. The spacecraft will go into an independent orbit of the sun in November of 2018, and will make up to 24 close approaches through June of 2025. Each orbit will take about 88 days to complete — the same as Mercury's orbit of the sun — and at its peak speeds, the ship will be moving at 450,000 mph (724,000 k/h), or fast enough to get from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. in one second.