NASA’s Mission to ‘Our Star’ Named After UChicago’s Eugene Parker

In 1958, University of Chicago astrophysicist Eugene Parker was ridiculed by others in his field – “deniers,” as he calls them – for introducing the theory of solar winds in an academic paper titled “Dynamics of the Interplanetary Gas and Magnetic Fields.”

They chose the wrong theory on which to throw shade.

This Aug. 11, Parker—now 91 and retired—will watch as a probe named in his honor launches at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, catapulting all the way to the sun’s corona, the closet to the sun that a spacecraft has ever traveled.

Data from NASA’s Mariner II mission to Venus in 1962 proved Parker’s theory correct: The sun radiates hot, charged particles that speedily travel in space, between the Earth and sun.

Finally, some 60 years later, NASA has the technology that can catapult a craft capable of withstanding the sun’s scorching temperatures, so scientists can examine solar winds, perhaps find questions to burning answers like why – nonsensically – the son’s corona (a crown of plasma that makes up the sun’s outer atmosphere) – is hotter than the star itself.

“Since this is a mission into unknown territory we have to be prepared for some surprises. Things that we never thought of or things that we thought of but were not correct,” Parker said.

Parker is the first living person to have a NASA craft named in his honor.