The names of two young ladies from Haldwani have also been included in the 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). The names of sisters Himani Mishra and Shivani Mishra have been included among the names sent up with the probe launched on Sunday.
During its seven-year mission, NASA’s Parker solar probe will swoop through the sun’s atmosphere 24 times. According to NASA, in addition to scientific instruments, the spacecraft also holds more than 1.1 million names submitted by the public to go to the sun. In March 2018, the people were invited to send their names to the sun aboard the first such mission to “touch” a star. A total of 1,137,202 names were submitted and confirmed over the seven-and-a-half-week period, and a memory card containing the names was installed on the spacecraft. The card was mounted on a plaque bearing a dedication to and a quote from the mission’s namesake, heliophysicist Eugene Parker, who first theorised the existence of the solar wind.
This is the first NASA mission to be named for a living individual.
This memory card also carries photos of Parker, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, and a copy of his groundbreaking 1958 scientific paper.
Parker solar probe will explore the sun’s outer atmosphere and slated to make critical observations to answer decades-old questions about the physics of stars. Inclusion of the names of two sisters from Haldwani is being viewed as an achievement by the locals here. Himani and Shivani are the daughters of MBPG College associate professor Santosh Mishra. He informed that while Shivani is a physics research student, Himani is pursuing an MSc in physics.