NASA and ESA plan mission to the Sun
Baku, October 5 (AZERTAC). NASA and the European Space Agency will combine forces to attempt an ambitious study of the sun.
The Solar Orbiter is planned to launch in 2017 and will pass within 26 million miles of the sun -- close enough to collect particles that have been propelled from the solar surface, Sky News reports.
The ESA says the probe will have to endure sunlight 13 times more intense than any seen on Earth with temperatures reaching 500 Celsius and extreme radioactivity that will test its equipment.
The ESA hopes the mission will provide insighte into how the sun generates the stream of high-energy particles, called the solar wind, that bathe the Earth and other planets.
NASA will participate, providing two instruments for the probe and the rocket to send it into space.
The ESA will also launch a space telescope in 2019. Euclid is designed to map out the large-scale structure of the universe with unprecedented accuracy. The observations are to stretch across 10 billion light years, revealing the history of its expansion and the growth of its structure during the last three-quarters of its history.
Like the Solar Orbiter, Euclid will cost close to a billion euros. But the mission still needs to clear some legal hurdles and formal adoption is not expected until next year. A launch could occur in 2019.
"They are both exciting missions, and it was really good to hear today that the physics Nobel Prize was awarded to research on the accelerating universe, which is of course linked to Euclid," said Alvaro Gimenez, the ESA`s director of science.
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