The astronomer who predicted the existence of the solar wind died on Tuesday at his home in Chicago. He died at the age of 94.
He had been a professor at the University of Chicago for decades.
Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA, said that the mission was renamed after Dr.Parker.
The solar wind can become violent when the sun throws out mass ejections. There is a chance that the eruptions could cause electrical surges in power grids.
"We know that what comes from the sun causes big impacts for us here at Earth," said the director of heliophysics at NASA in a telephone interview.
The reviewers and editor of The Astrophysical Journal that published the prediction did not believe it.
According to The New York Times, Dr. Parker said that the prevailing view among some people was that space was absolutely clean.
He appealed to the journal's editor who was an astronomer at the University of Chicago. The reviewers didn't point out any errors in the calculations that described how the particles flowed from the sun.
Michael S. Turner, an astronomer at the Kavli Foundation in Los Angeles, said that he went where the equations led him.
When people pointed out a mistake in his calculations, he was happy but not pleased.
Dr. Turner said that he had little patience for it.
The paper was published even though Dr. Chandrasekhar disagreed with the conclusions of the reviewers.
After four years, Dr.Parker was vindicated when he saw the energetic particles that he had predicted.
NASA had been working on a mission called Solar Probe Plus, which was to swoop close to the sun repeatedly, for years before Dr. Zurbuchen joined the agency. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine was asked to suggest a name for the mission by Dr. Zurbuchen, who disliked the name Solar Probe Plus.
The response was unanimous: Eugene Parker.
NASA had never named a vehicle after a living person. Dr. Zurbuchen said he was able to get Robert Lightfoot, the acting administrator of NASA at the time, to approve the change. He told Dr. Zurbuchen that it would be fine. Dr. Zurbuchen said it would be his honor.
He said he was surprised that NASA asked for his permission.
Dr.Parker went to the Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland to see the craft that was built and tested. The project scientist for the mission, Dr. Fox, said, "Parker, meet Parker."
The next year, Dr. Parker and his family traveled to Florida to watch the launch of his eponymous craft.
The Delta 4 Heavy rocket lit up the early-morning skies around Cape Canaveral on August 12.
Dr. Zurbuchen was watching the liftoff when he saw him cry twice. The first time he pulled up to the rocket and his name was on it, the magnitude of what was happening really got to him.
Dr. Fox traveled to Chicago to show Dr. Parker some of the data from the probe.
She said that Dr. Fox sent him preprints of the papers that scientists were writing about.
On June 10, 1927, Eugene Newman Parker was born. His father was an engineer at Chrysler and his mother was a homemaker.
After graduating from Michigan State University with a degree in physics in 1948, Dr.Parker went on to earn a PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 1951. In 1995 he retired but continued to publish.
Dr.Parker and John A. Simpson collaborated on research about the sun and its rays. The thought was that the high-energy Cosmic rays could reveal something about the space between planets in the solar system. That led to solar physics.
In the 1950s, the common wisdom among scientists was that space was empty, but comets had already suggested otherwise. The gas and dust from a comet does not flow behind it, as one might expect, but instead it points away from the sun.
The flow of particles would follow the same dynamics as wind and water. The flow started slow near the sun and accelerated to supersonic speeds as it moved away.
How the sun produces magnetic fields, the magnetic fields of galaxies, and the structure of magnetized shock waves are some of the research puzzles that Dr.Parker later turned to.
He understood magnetism better than anyone else.
His work did not rely on 20th-century physics discoveries like quantum mechanics or Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, but rather on older physics like James Clerk Maxwell's equations.
Dr. Turner said that he found new and novel solutions.
The National Medal of Science was awarded to Dr.Parker in 1989.
He is survived by his family, including his wife, brother, son, daughter, and two great-grandchildren.
The sun's outer atmosphere is very hot. The surface of the sun is very cold. The outer atmosphere known as the corona is much hotter and has less gas than that.
Dr.Parker proposed in 1972 that a lot of tiny solar flares were heating the corona. When she met with Dr.Parker, he asked if she had found any nanoflares.
In 2020, researchers using data from two of NASA's other sun-watching satellites reported that they had figured out how the energy could be turned to heat. This is one of the many theories that could explain the superhot corona.
The flybys of Venus that the solar probe will use to brake down on the sun in the coming years could be used to pick up radio signals from the sun.
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