New Delhi, May 31: In what is believed to be a major milestone in space science, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will officially announce its first mission to fly directly into our sun’s atmosphere. Calling it the first ever mission to “touch the Sun”, the space agency in its release said that it will make the announcement at 11 AM EDT on Wednesday (which means 8.30 PM IST on Wednesday). The announcement will be made from the University of Chicago’s William Eckhardt Research Center Auditorium. The official release informed that the event will air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website.
NASA’s Solar Probe Plus (SPP) is scheduled to launch in the summer of 2018. The NASA spacecraft will be placed in orbit within four million miles of the sun’s surface. In this orbit, the spacecraft will face heat and radiation unlike any spacecraft in history.
The sun is 93 million miles (about 150,000,000 kilometers) from Earth. The connection and interactions between the Sun and Earth drive the seasons, ocean currents, weather, climate, radiation belts and aurorae. Though it is special to us, there are billions of stars like our sun scattered across the Milky Way galaxy. It is believed that the NASA spacecraft will explore the sun’s outer atmosphere and make critical observations that will answer decades-old questions about the physics of how stars work. The resulting data will improve forecasts of major space weather events that impact life on Earth, as well as satellites and astronauts in space.
As per reports, a 370-kilogram (815-pound) block of instruments called Helios 2 came within about 43 million kilometres (27 million miles) of the Sun’s surface in its mission to study solar winds and cosmic rays in 1976. It has been reported that NASA is going to get close with the Sun’s corona than Helios 2 to ways to improve the understanding of the Sun.
The participants who will be a part of NASA’s sun mission include Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington; Nicola Fox, mission project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, Eugene Parker, S. Chandrasekhar Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, Eric Isaacs, executive vice president for research, innovation and national laboratories at the University of Chicago, Rocky Kolb, dean of the Division of the Physical Sciences at the University of Chicago.