June 2017 Harf Facts - Final

Raj Malhotra’s IAS Study Group
NASA's first mission to the star set for 2018
Wearing a nearly 5-inch coat of carbon-composite solar shields, NASA's Parker Solar Probe will explore the sun's
atmosphere in a mission that begins in the summer of 2018. It's not a journey that any human can make, so
NASA is sending a roughly 10-foot-high probe on the historic mission that will put it closer to the sun than any
spacecraft has ever reached before.
The probe will have to withstand heat and radiation never before experienced by any spacecraft, but the
specially designed mission will also address questions that couldn't be answered before. Understanding the sun
in greater detail can also shed light on Earth and its place in the solar system, researchers said.
This is NASA's first mission to the sun and its outermost atmosphere, called the corona.
On Wednesday, the craft -- initially called the Solar Probe Plus -- was renamed the Parker Solar Probe in honor
of astrophysicist Eugene Parker. "This is the first time NASA has named a spacecraft for a living individual," said
Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "It's a
testament to the importance of his body of work, founding a new field of science that also inspired my own
research and many important science questions NASA continues to study and further understand every day."
The probe will eventually orbit within 3.7 million miles of the sun's surface. The observations and data could
provide insight about the physics of stars, change what we know about the mysterious corona, increase
understanding of solar wind and help improve forecasting of major space weather events. Those events can
impact satellites and astronauts as well as the Earth -- including the power grid and radiation exposure on airline
flights, NASA said.
The mission's objectives include "tracing the flow of energy that heats and accelerates the sun's corona and
solar wind, determining the structure and dynamics of the plasma and magnetic fields at the sources of the solar
wind and explore mechanisms that accelerate and transport energetic particles." The probe will reach a speed
of 450,000 mph around the sun. On Earth, this speed would enable someone to get from Philadelphia to
Washington in one second, the agency said. The mission will also pass through the origin of the solar particles
with the highest energy.
The mission is scheduled to end in June 2025.
NASA is all Set to Launch First Ever Mission to Study Neutron Stars
NASA is set to launch the world's first mission tomorrow to study rapidly spinning neutron stars - the densest
objects in the universe - nearly 50 years after they were discovered. The same platform will also carry out the
world's first demonstration of X-ray navigation in space. The agency plans to launch the two-in-one Neutron Star
Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) aboard SpaceX CRS-11, a cargo resupply mission to the International
Space Station (ISS) to be launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on Saturday. The launch was earlier planned for
June 1, but was delayed due to poor weather. About a week after its installation, this one-of-a-kind investigation
will begin observing neutron stars, the densest objects in the universe. The mission will focus especially on
pulsars – those neutron stars that appear to wink on and off because their spin sweeps beams of radiation past
us, like a cosmic lighthouse.
Due to their extreme nature, neutron stars and pulsars have engendered a great deal of interest since their
existence was proposed in 1939 and then discovered in 1967. These objects are the remnants of massive stars
that, after exhausting their nuclear fuel, exploded and collapsed into super-dense spheres.
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