Nasa launches solar probe for close look at sun
Parker Solar Probe — Nasa’s most ambitious mission — set off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Sunday for its date with the sun.
The Parker probe, which was launched at 1.01 pm IST aboard the Delta IV-Heavy rocket will, over the next seven years, come within 6.16 million km of the sun.
“Parker Solar Probe is a mission of extremes,” Kelly Korreck, an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said. “It will be the closest human-made object to the sun, going 96% of the distance from the Earth to the sun.”
The probe will also be the fastest human-made object, travelling at 692,000 km per hour, according to Korreck, who is part of the mission.
One reason why scientists are sending the probe is to study the sun’s atmosphere and the property it exhibits of being hotter than the surface of the sun itself. The other great mystery is the behaviour of “solar wind” — a stream of charged particles emitted by the sun to release energy.
Eugene Parker, a professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, after whom the probe is named, first theorised about the existence of solar wind.
“We are very excited about the Parker probe — the data from the mission will be public and we will be working with the data,” Dipankar Banerjee, an astrophysicist at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore, said.
India’s own sun mission, Aditya L1, is in its initial stages, according to an Isro spokesperson, and is scheduled for launch in 2020.
The Parker Solar Probe is named for Eugene Parker, a professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago. This is the first time Nasa has named a mission after a living individual