NASA Gears Up For Solar Probe Plus To Unravel The Mysteries Of Sun

September 7th, 2010 - 7:04 pm ICT by GD  

By Gina Gomez
sunSep 7, (THAINDIAN NEWS) NASA is gearing up to unravel the unknown mysteries of the sun with a new venture that has been titled Solar Probe Plus. The project which would be the very first of its kind is expected shed lights into the unknown facts of sun and at the same time would also provide revealing insights about the solar system as a whole. The project which involved launching a spacecraft approximately at a distance of four miles from the surface of the sun would be exploring a region of the atmosphere that has remained beyond the bounds of any spacecraft till now.

Scientist Lika Guhathakurta, who is the program scientist of the Solar Probe Plus has divulged to the media that through the project for the very first time, human beings would get the opportunity to ‘touch, taste and smell our sun’ as the spacecraft would be able to go areas in the atmosphere that have never been explored before. Meanwhile, scientist Dick Fisher who is the director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division in its Washington based headquarters has stated that the experiments that would be conducted under the project Solar Probe Plus have been designed in a manner so that they answer two basic questions about sun. One of them is why the outer atmosphere of the sun is so much hotter than its visible surface and the other one is the knowing about the factor that propels solar wins affecting Earth and the solar system.

The project is expected to materialize by the year 2018 and if it actually becomes successful in answering the basic mysteries about the sun then it was surely going to be an unprecedented milestone in the history of NASA.

Related Stories


Posted in Sci-Tech |