CNET reports the crazy journey starts early Sunday when the Parker Solar Probe is scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket (a Saturday launch was scrubbed due to a technical glitch). 

The ambitious mission hopes to solve some of the more baffling solar mysteries, like why the sun's outlying corona is so much hotter than its surface and where the solar wind comes from.

But perhaps more important to everyday Earthlings, the data collected by the probe could improve how we predict space weather, which can interfere with the electronics and communications technology that our society increasingly depends on.

The Parker Solar Probe is the first NASA spacecraft with a living namesake, 91-year-old Eugene Parker, who's credited with discovering the existence of the solar wind, or constant flow of charged particles that the sun sends into the solar system, in the 1950s.

CNET