Parker Solar Probe: Names of two Indian women sent up with the probe

Parker Solar Probe, NASA’s first ever mission to reach sun carries along names of people. Names of two Indian women from Haldwani area of Uttarakhand have also been included in more than 1.1 million names submitted by the public and included in the Parker Solar Probe recently launched by the USA’s space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). 

Names of siblings, Himani Mishra and Shivani Mishra have been included among the names sent up with the probe launched on Sunday last week.

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“A total of 1,137,202 names were confirmed in  10 days period, and a memory card containing the names was installed on the spacecraft on May 18 this year – three months before the scheduled launch” said Nicola Fox, project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in the US.

The memory card also carries photos of Parker, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, and a copy of his ground breaking 1958 scientific paper.

“Throughout its seven-year mission, the probe will swoop through the Sun’s atmosphere 24 times, getting closer to our star than any spacecraft has gone before. Parker Solar Probe is going to revolutionise our understanding of the Sun, the only star we can study up close” he said.

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Parker Solar Probe is protected by an ultra-powerful heat shield that can endure unprecedented levels of heat, and radiations 500 times than experienced on Earth.