NASA will launch a new solar observatory tonight, and will allow the public to watch the launch live.
The project will monitor how the energy moves across the sun's surface to the burning hot corona, according to a NASA press release. The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission will point a seven-foot ultraviolet telescope at the sun, to watch the energy rapidly heat up from 6,000 degrees to millions of degrees.
"IRIS will show the solar chromosphere in more detail than has ever been observed before," said Adrian Daw, deputy project scientist. "My opinion is that we are bound to see something we didn't expect to see."
The scientists will gather their new data and combine it with findings from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which looks at the whole sun. The new observatory will only study about one percent of the solar surface.
"IRIS almost acts as a microscope to SDO's telescope," said Jim Hall, NASA's Launch Services Program's mission manager for IRIS. "It's going to look in closely and it's going to look at that specific region to see how the changes in matter and energy occur in this region. It's going to collectively bring us a more complete view of the sun."
The researchers hope to discover how the sun's behavior affects the Earth's climate.
"We're always looking for the answers to why and everything starts at the root with the sun," Hall said.
IRIS will be carried on a rocket called Pegasus, the only air-launch winged launcher possessed by NASA, which has completed 27 successful missions since 1996.
"I think the biggest surprise will come once the mission is launched and it starts to observe the sun," Daw said. "We know to some extent what we hope to learn, what specific science questions we are going to answer, but there's always that element of surprise."
Watch the launch live tonight at 9 p.m. EDT via space.com.
