CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A NASA spacecraft will aim straight for the sun next year and bear the name of the astrophysicist who predicted the existence of the solar wind nearly 60 years ago.

The space agency annmission would be named after Eugene Parker, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. It’s the first spacecraft to be named after a researcher who is still alive, the agency’s science mission chief, Thomas Zurbuchen, said.

Scheduled to launch next summer from Cape Canaveral, the Parker Solar Probe will fly within 4 million miles of the sun’s surface, right into the solar atmosphere. That will be closer than any other spacecraft, and subject the probe to brutal heat and radiation like no other man-made structure before. The materials weren’t available to undertake such a grueling mission until now.

The purpose is to study the sun’s outer atmosphere and better understand how stars like ours work.

NASA spacecraft have traveled inside the orbit of Mercury, the innermost planet.

‘‘But until you actually go there and touch the sun, you really can’t answer these questions,’’ like why is the corona — the outer plasma-loaded atmosphere — hotter than the actual surface of the sun, said mission scientist Nicola Fox of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory.

Parker Solar Probe — formerly known as Solar Probe Plus — will venture seven times closer than any previous spacecraft, Fox said.

ASSOCIATED PRESS