dr. Parker, he said, was happy when people pointed to an error in his calculations, but not happy when people simply accepted prevailing scientific assumptions.
“He had little patience for ‘It is well known that…'” said Dr. gymnast.
Although Dr. Chandrasekhar, a future Nobel laureate, disagreed with Dr. Parker, he ignored the reviewers and the article was published.
Four years later, Dr. Parker justified when Mariner 2, a NASA spacecraft bound for Venus, observed energetic particles streaming through interplanetary space — exactly what he predicted.
When Dr. Zurbuchen joined NASA in 2016, the agency had been working for years on a mission called Solar Probe Plus, which would repeatedly dive close to the sun. dr. Zurbuchen said he disliked the name Solar Probe Plus and wrote to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine asking to propose a person to name the mission after.
The unequivocal answer: Eugene Parker.
NASA had never before named a spacecraft after a living person. But dr. Zurbuchen, who Dr. Parker had met years earlier, said he had no qualms about approving the change in 2017 with Robert Lightfoot, NASA’s acting administrator at the time. dr. Zurbuchen called when Dr. Parker to ask if he’s okay with that. “He said, ‘Absolutely. It will be an honour,'” Dr. Zurbuchen recalled.
dr. Parker later said he was surprised that NASA had asked for his permission.
A few months later, Dr. Parker to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, where the spacecraft was built and tested. dr. Fox, then project scientist for the mission, recalled saying, “Parker, meet Parker.”
The following year, Dr. Parker and his family travel to Florida to see the launch of his eponymous spacecraft.
