In what seemed to be something out of a sci-fi movie, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe with a mission to “touch the sun”. The Parker Solar Probe will however not be actually “touching the sun”. It will, however, be the first man-made object to go that close to the sun. As a part of this ambitious project, the probe aims to dip directly into the corona or the outer atmosphere of the Sun. The Delta-IV heavy rocket that was carrying the Parker Solar Probe was launched after a failed attempt the previous day caused by a last-minute alarm resulting in the missing of the sixty-five-minute alarm.
The Parker Space Probe has now been successfully released into space and is all set to become the fastest moving man-made object in history. To get an idea of the speed, a project scientist told BBC that it could cover the distance between Tokyo and New York in under a minute!
The spacecraft is the first one to name after a living person- Eugene Parker, the ninety-one-year-old astrophysicist who described solar winds in 1958. The Parker Solar Probe will be making twenty-four loops around the Sun to study the physics of the corona and answer many unanswered questions over a course of seven years.
The successful launch of this probe was the second victory for NASA after having discovered water on Jupiter in the same week.
While observing the depths of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, which is a storm that has been raging on it for three hundred and fifty years now, scientists, have discovered water just above the deepest clouds of the largest planet in the solar system.
The calculations made with the help of the observations recorded prove that not only does Jupiter have oxygen but also has two to nine times more oxygen than the Sun.
The scientists of NASA proved all the flak and criticism the organization receives for spending the tax payer’s money wrong when it took two major leaps in science within a week.
