The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that it will make announcement about its first mission to fly directly into the sun on Saturday, 27th May, 2017.
The announcement will be made on Wednesday, 31st May, 2017 by 11am EDT from the
University of Chicago, in William Eckhardt Research Center
Auditorium.
The event will also be aired live on NASA Television and the agency’s
website.
The mission titled Solar Probe Plus,
is scheduled to launch in the summer of 2018. “Placed in orbit within
four million miles of the sun’s surface, and facing heat and radiation
unlike any spacecraft in history, the 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”.
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| Photo by NASA |
Participants of the interesting adventure 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
