OrbitalHub

NASA dixit:

“Watch in 360 degrees as an United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex-37 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida carrying NASA’s Parker Solar Probe spacecraft. Roughly the size of a small car, the spacecraft lifted off at 3:31 a.m. EDT on August 12, 2018, starting its historic mission to “touch” the Sun.”

Video Credit: NASA

NASA dixit:

“NASA’s Curiosity rover surveyed its surroundings on August 9, 2018, producing a 360-degree panorama of its current location on Mars’ Vera Rubin Ridge. The panorama includes skies darkened by a fading global dust storm and a view from the Mast Camera of the rover itself, revealing a thin layer of dust on Curiosity’s deck. In the foreground is the rover’s most recent drill target, named “Stoer” after a town in Scotland near where important discoveries about early life on Earth were made in lakebed sediments.”

Video Credit: NASA

NASA dixit:

“NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission launched in 2016 and now (August, 2018) is entering its approach phase. OSIRIS-REx will arrive at asteroid Bennu in December, 2018. OSIRIS-REx will help unveil the mysteries of our solar system’s formation.”

Video Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Katrina Jackson

ULA dixit:

“Parker Solar Probe (previously Solar Probe, Solar Probe Plus, or Solar Probe+, abbreviated PSP) is a NASA robotic spacecraft en route to probe the outer corona of the Sun. It will approach to within 8.86 solar radii (6.2 million kilometers or 3.85 million miles) from the “surface” (photosphere) of the Sun and will travel, at closest approach, as fast as 700,000 km/h (430,000 mph). ”

Video Credit: ULA

NASA dixit:

“NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission launched August 11 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The mission will be the first to fly directly through the Sun’s corona – the hazardous region of intense heat and solar radiation in the Sun’s atmosphere that is visible during an eclipse. It will gather data that could help answer questions about solar physics that have puzzled scientists for decades. Gathering information about fundamental processes near the Sun can help improve our understanding of how our solar system’s star changes the space environment, where space weather can affect astronauts, interfere with satellite orbits, or damage spacecraft electronics.”

Credits Video: NASA

NASA dixit:

“NASA’s historic Parker Solar Probe mission will revolutionize our understanding of the Sun, where changing conditions can propagate out into the solar system, affecting Earth and other worlds. Parker Solar Probe will travel through the Sun’s atmosphere, closer to the surface than any spacecraft before it, facing brutal heat and radiation conditions — and ultimately providing humanity with the closest-ever observations of a star.

In order to unlock the mysteries of the Sun’s atmosphere, Parker Solar Probe will use Venus’ gravity during seven flybys over nearly seven years to gradually bring its orbit closer to the Sun. The spacecraft will fly through the Sun’s atmosphere as close as 3.8 million miles to our star’s surface, well within the orbit of Mercury and more than seven times closer than any spacecraft has come before. (Earth’s average distance to the Sun is 93 million miles.)

Flying into the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere, known as the corona, for the first time, Parker Solar Probe will employ a combination of in situ measurements and imaging to revolutionize our understanding of the corona and expand our knowledge of the origin and evolution of the solar wind. It will also make critical contributions to our ability to forecast changes in Earth’s space environment that affect life and technology on Earth.

Parker Solar Probe will perform its scientific investigations in a hazardous region of intense heat and solar radiation. The spacecraft will fly close enough to the Sun to watch the solar wind speed up from subsonic to supersonic, and it will fly though the birthplace of the highest-energy solar particles.

To perform these unprecedented investigations, the spacecraft and instruments will be protected from the Sun’s heat by a 4.5-inch-thick (11.43 cm) carbon-composite shield, which will need to withstand temperatures outside the spacecraft that reach nearly 2,500 F (1,377 C).”

Credits Video: NASA Kennedy