A new spacecraft will examine the sun close up

THE SUN is one of the most-studied objects in the sky, but plenty of mysteries remain. On February 10th a rocket blasted off from Florida carrying , a European space probe designed to solve some of them. This craft will spend the next two years performing fly-bys of Venus and Earth, using the gravity of both planets to kick itself into an unusual orbit that will take it well above the ecliptic, the plane in which all of the sun’s planets orbit.From that vantage will peer at the sun’s poles, something no spacecraft has managed before, and do so from close up. At its nearest, it will be just 42m km from the sun—closer than Mercury, the innermost planet, gets. One of its features is, therefore, a heat shield coated with charcoal made from cooked animal bone and designed to endure temperatures up to 500°C. Tiny windows within this will illuminate the probe’s various instruments.