Why in news?
Dipankar Banerjee, an Indian solar physicist, has been named a co-investigator of the Punch Mission at NASA.
More about the mission
- It stands for Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere.
- It will be launched in 2022.
- It is concerned with understanding the transition of particles from the corona of the sun through the solar winds which fill the interplanetary space.
- The microsats have been used here to orbit the earth and the study corona and the atmosphere of the sun.
- It will also track the solar wind and coronal mass ejections that influence the space atmosphere.
- India is expected to join this mission with its own Aditya L1 built for the same purposes.
Regions of sun
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- Corona- Outermost region of the sun.
- Coronal mass ejections are the plasmas of enormous energy that gets thrown out of the atmosphere of the Sun and influence the weather events in space.
- Solar winds are the constant streams of solar material that flows of the sun.
