New Year Resolutions anyone? NASA’s 2018 resolutions look forward to touch ‘Sun’

Washington, January 1: New Year Resolutions anyone? What are yours? NASA has got perky yet dangerous resolutions set for New Year 2018. Any guesses? NASA’s 2018 interesting goal is to touch ‘Sun’. With its Solar Parker Probe, NASA aims to explore boiling atmosphere of Sun. The Parker Solar Probe will perform its scientific investigations in a hazardous region of intense heat and solar radiation. The primary science goals for the mission are to track how energy and heat move through the solar corona and to explore what accelerates the solar wind as well as solar energetic particles. 

The probe will use Venus’ gravity during seven flybys over nearly seven years to gradually bring its orbit closer to the Sun, according to a NASA statement.

NASA set to launch Solar Parker Probe around July and August. Parker Solar Probe will fly within Mercury's orbit but only 6.2 million kilometers away from Sun's surface. No spacecraft has gone that close to Sun before. The probe will be designed to survive temperatures of over 1,371 degrees Celsius, powerful radiations, and supersonic particles' impacts.

The Parker Solar Probe mission, earlier called Solar Probe Plus, was approved in 2014. It was renamed to honor University of Chicago physicist Eugene Parker who accurately predicted solar wind's existence in 1958. It is designed and built by the Johns Hopkins University laboratory. NASA is spending $1.5bn for building and launching the probe. It will have instruments to measure and sample Sun's corona.

In 2018, the US space agency will also launch the next-generation satellites of two long-term missions - ICESat-2 and GRACE Follow-On. ICESat-2 and GRACE Follow-On will measure Earth's ice sheet elevation, sea ice level, water movement across the planet, land topography, vegetation characteristics, etc.