At this point, we knew that solar magnetism was behaving in ways we weren\u2019t expecting. SOHO data had revealed that globally, the solar magnetic field was far more variable than we had imagined. And the particles comprising the solar wind, as measured near Earth, had peculiar compositional patterns that didn\u2019t make sense if the wind was emanating directly from the sun\u2019s surface, as had been predicted. It seemed that some kind of magnetic activity in the solar atmosphere was producing that wind \u2014 and the corona\u2019s heat \u2014 but we didn\u2019t have the models\u00a0to explain how it worked.<\/p>\n

The discussions in the meeting were long and intense, but they laid the foundation for a key decision: There was an absolute need to make observations closer to the sun with a mission notionally called Solar Probe. A model of that spacecraft \u2014 a probe that could withstand the harshness of the near-solar environment \u2014 was at the front of the meeting room, and after four decades of thinking about it, we were going to make it a reality. In 2017, shortly after I joined NASA as the head of science, the agency renamed the mission after Eugene Parker, based on my recommendation. It was now Parker Solar Probe.<\/p>\n