US space agency, NASA is turning 60 in 2018 and on this occasion it is planning to launch a slew of important missions in 2018.
-One of those planned mission for 2018 is NASA’s Parker Solar Probe to explore the Sun’s outer atmosphere.
-The Parker 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 6.2 million kilometres to sun’s surface, well within the orbit of Mercury and closer than any spacecraft has gone before.
-The Parker Solar Probe will perform its scientific investigations in a hazardous region of intense heat and solar radiation.
-The primary science goals for the mission are to trace how energy and heat move through the solar corona and to explore what accelerates the solar wind as well as solar energetic particles.
-Apart from, Parker Probe, in 2018, NASA will also add to its existing robotic fleet at the Red Planet with the InSight Mars lander designed to study the interior and subsurface of the planet.
-The NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission, OSIRIS-REx, is scheduled to arrive at the near-Earth asteroid Bennu in August 2018, and will return a sample for study in 2023.
