Here’s a golden opportunity for you to send your name to the Sun. Yes, NASA is giving you a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ opportunity for your name to ride along on its mission to the Sun. The space agency is inviting people around the world to submit their names online to be placed on a memory card that would be included on the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft. You have time until April 27, to complete the registration process – to send your name to the sun.
Image Source: JHUAPL website
In May 2017, NASA renamed the spacecraft from the Solar Probe Plus to the Parker Solar Probe in honour of astrophysicist Eugene Parker. The mission will launch in summer 2018 and will be placed within four million miles of the sun’s surface, and facing heat and radiation unlike any spacecraft in history. “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.
The spacecraft and instruments will be protected from the Sun’s heat by a 4.5-inch-thick carbon-composite shield, which will need to withstand temperatures outside the spacecraft that reach nearly 2,500 F. The spacecraft can travel at a speed of 430,000 mph.
“The spacecraft, about the size of a small car, will travel directly into the Sun’s atmosphere about 4 million miles from the star’s surface. The primary science goals for the mission are to trace how energy and heat move through the solar corona and to explore what accelerates the solar wind as well as solar energetic particles. The mission will revolutionize our understanding of the Sun, where changing conditions can spread out into the solar system, affecting Earth and other worlds.”, NASA said in a statement.
So, if you want to send your name to the sun on the first-ever mission to Sun, then you need to register yourself before April 27, 2018. To know more, visit the official website of NASA.