Interstellar Probe Would be Humanitys Fastest and Farthest Step Into Space – News18

NASA and its partners are planning a new space mission called Interstellar Probe'. This would reach interstellar space, the deep region beyond the suns influence, within 15 years. The timeline is much quicker than Voyager 1, an earlier spacecraft launched by NASA in 1977, which travelled the distance in 35 years. The proposed spacecraft would also take an image of our heliosphere, the bubble created by the sun that protects our solar system from interstellar radiation. The mission will represent humanity's first deliberate step into the sea of space between our Sun and other potentially habitable systems, as per the mission statement.

TraveLling far beyond the Sun's sphere of influence, an Interstellar Probe would be the boldest move in space exploration since humans landed on the moon, remarkedthe mission team which presented its proposal on Monday, April 26, at the annual general assembly of the European Geosciences Union. The team is led by Elena Provorinova, the missions heliophysics lead from the John Hopkins Applied Physics lab (APL), Maryland, United States. APL-led mission team involves some 500 people from around the world including scientists, engineers and enthusiasts.

The mission would help us understand how the Sun makes our solar system habitable and where it lies in our galaxy. Moreover, it would also get us data that will shed light on the origin and evolution of the planetary systems, and the formation of early galaxies and stars. The probe could launch in the early 2030s.

The need for this mission has fuelled the space exploration community for decades. On August 1, 2012, human exploration of space made history as Voyager 1 dived into interstellar space.Voyager 1, a part of NASAs Voyager program, has travelled around 38 billion kilometres which is about 150 times the distance of the sun from the Earth. The Voyager program was aimed to explore the outer limits of the Sun's sphere of influence other than exploring the solar system beyond the neighbour planets. NASA also hoped Voyager 1, the farthest man-made object, to go possibly beyond '' the suns influence.

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Interstellar Probe Would be Humanitys Fastest and Farthest Step Into Space - News18