NASA’s historic ‘Parker Solar Probe’ to study our ‘Sun’; submit your names online to get featured along on ride

Mumbai, March 11: Studying Sun has always been a keen priority for scientists also NASA is set to carry its historic ‘Parker Solar Probe’. NASA is inviting people around the world to submit their names online to be placed on a microchip aboard NASA’s historic Parker Solar Probe mission launching in summer 2018. 

The mission will travel through the Sun’s atmosphere, facing brutal heat and radiation conditions — and your name will go along for the ride.

“This probe will journey to a region humanity has never explored before,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This mission will answer questions scientists have sought to uncover for more than six decades.”

Understanding the Sun has always been a top priority for space scientists. Studying how the Sun affects space and the space environment of planets in the field known as heliophysics.

The field is not only vital to understanding Earth’s most important and life-sustaining star, it supports exploration in the solar system and beyond. The ‘Parker Solar Probe’ mission will revolutionize our understanding of the Sun, where changing conditions can spread out into the solar system, affecting Earth and other worlds.

“Parker Solar Probe is, quite literally, the fastest, hottest and, to me, coolest mission under the Sun,” said project scientist Nicola Fox, of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. “This incredible spacecraft is going to reveal so much about our star and how it works that we’ve not been able to understand.”