The ‘Solar Probe Plus Mission’ which was announced by NASA back in 2010 as a future plan to visit and explore the Sun, has now been confirmed to take place in 2018, in which a spacecraft will be sent in an attempt to study the outer atmosphere of the Sun and its effects on Earth.
NASA will launch a spacecraft called ‘Parker Probe Plus’ which will be hovering over the Sun, approximately four million miles from its surface. This may not sound very close, but it is still a daring attempt by NASA as no other spacecraft has been this closer to sun ever before.
It becomes unbearable for any spacecraft to face intense heat and radiations coming out of the Earth’s Sun, but the advanced design and mechanism of ‘The Parker probe’ will help it swoop repeatedly at 118 miles per second through the sun’s corona.
Named after solar astrophysicist Eugene Parker who has eminent work done in discovering the solar winds, Parker Probe Mission will be led by his fundamental contributions in the field. “Parker Solar Probe is gonna go right into the corona and answer questions that have puzzled scientist for decades.” says Nicky Fox, Parker Probe scientist.
The mission is to discover the causes of solar storms and monitor solar activity that influences Earth, causing auroras and affecting power grids and satellites. It will also try to find as to why the Sun’s atmosphere has more intense heat than its surface. ‘Parker Probe’ will be constantly testing the radiations by sampling the environment and sending it to the center of NASA on Earth.
“So to get that close to sun, you have got to build a heat shield”, says Betsy Congdon, an applied physician, while showing a material that’s been used in creating the powerful anti-heat spacecraft, on NASA’s Snapchat story.
As no mission from our Planet Earth has ever been planned before to visit the Sun, Parker Probe Mission will surely going to find and present new discoveries from our divine universe.