NASA accepting submissions from those who want to ‘touch the Sun’

The space agency NASA has publicly invited everyone around the world to get a chance to ‘touch the Sun’ with their historic Parker Solar Probe mission launching in 2018.

Two days ago, NASA invited everyone to submit their names online so that they could be place on a microchip that will go aboard NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission that will soon be launched on July 31, 2018. The craft will travel through the Sun’s atmosphere along with our names. NASA is accepting submissions till April 27, 2018.

Even William Shatner, the ‘Star Trek’ actor has signed up for the journey and asked everyone else to do so too in a NASA video. “The first-ever spacecraft to the Sun, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, will launch this year on a course to orbit through the heat of our star’s corona, where temperatures are greater than 1 million degrees. The spacecraft will also carry my name to the Sun, and your name, and the names of everyone who wants to join this voyage of extreme exploration.”

NASA plans on ‘touching the Sun’

As NASA explains, the mission will face ‘brutal heat and radiation conditions’. “This probe will journey to a region humanity has never explored before. This mission will answer questions scientists have sought to uncover for more than six decades,” claimed Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The spacecraft is just about the size of a small car and is expected to travel directly into the Sun’s atmosphere, which is around four million miles from Sun’s surface. Expected to revolutionize our understanding of the Sun, the aim of the $1.5 billion mission is to trace how energy and heat move through the solar aura and to discover what accelerates the solar wind and solar energetic particles.

Also, the spacecraft is extremely fast that its closet approach to the Sun will be at around 430,000mph, which is fast enough to go from Washington to Tokyo within a minute, NASA explained.

“Parker Solar Probe is, quite literally, the fastest, hottest — and, to me, coolest — mission under the Sun,” said project scientist Nicola Fox. “This incredible spacecraft is going to reveal so much about our star and how it works that we’ve not been able to understand.”