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NASA’s Parker Solar Probe: A mission to touch the Sun

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US space agency, NASA has launched its mission to send a satellite closer to the Sun. The Parker Solar Probe Delta-IV Heavy rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida on Sunday.

The probe that aims to dip directly into our star’s outer atmosphere, or corona; is set to become the fastest-moving manmade object in history. Its data promises to crack longstanding mysteries about the Sun’s behaviour. It will dip inside the tenuous atmosphere, sampling conditions to just 6.16 million km from the Sun’s broiling surface.

Earlier today, just under an hour after the launch, NASA confirmed that the spacecraft had successfully separated and the probe had been released into space.

It is the first spacecraft to be named after a living person – astrophysicist Eugene Parker, 91, who first described solar wind in 1958.

After a failed attempt on August 11, the agency had to miss its 65-minute weather window.

The spacecraft launched at 3:31 am ET to begin its journey to the Sun and uncover solar mysteries.

It will zip past Venus in six weeks and make the first rendezvous with the Sun a further six weeks after that. Over the course of seven years, Parker will make 24 loops around our star to study the physics of the corona, the place where much of the important activity that affects the Earth seems to originate.

According to BBC, Dr Nicky Fox, the British-born project scientist who is affiliated to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory explained, “I realise that might not sound that close, but imagine the Sun and the Earth were a meter apart. Parker Solar Probe would be just 4cm away from the Sun.”

“We’ll also be the fastest human-made object ever, travelling around the Sun at speeds of up to 690,000km/h (430,000mph) – New York to Tokyo in under a minute!” Nicky Fox added.

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