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Launch
An expedition nearly six decades in the making was dispatched toward the inner solar system on a warm summer morning. Parker Solar Probe — designed, built, and managed for NASA by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) — lifted off on Aug. 12, 2018, at 3:31 a.m. EDT from what is now Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Thousands of spectators followed the glowing path of the Delta IV Heavy rocket as it zipped away from the Florida coastline. Among them was Eugene Parker, the scientist whose theories on the solar wind and related activity were now about to be put to the test by his namesake spacecraft.
