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Parker Solar Probe

A Parker Solar Probe spacecraft is depicted against a glowing orange solar corona, showcasing its mission to study the Sun's atmosphere.

A NASA spacecraft launched in 2018 to fly closer to the Sun than any previous mission, dipping repeatedly through the outer corona behind a carbon-composite heat shield. Named for the astrophysicist Eugene Parker, who predicted the solar wind in 1958, it is the first probe to take in-situ measurements inside the Sun's atmosphere — directly sampling the plasma whose heating mechanism has puzzled physicists for nearly a century.

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