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Adam Szabo, mission scientist for Parker at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, noted that the agency’s goal of exploring the Sun dates all the way back to 1958, the same year NASA was formally founded. “We are really excited that finally we’ve reached the capability, in the United States, that we can put together such a mission to get as close to the Sun as possible,” Szabo said in a Motherboard interview that included Betsy Congdon, lead thermal protection system engineer for Parker at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The spacecraft can withstand conditions within the outer atmosphere of the Sun, called the corona, and it will eventually travel just 4.3 million miles from the star’s center—seven times closer than any previous mission.“One way to think about it is, if you put [Parker] on a football field with the Sun at one side and Earth at the other side, we’re getting in the four-yard line,” said Congdon. “We’re getting in the Sun’s corona, so it’s very exciting.”
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