Atstrophysicist Eugene N. ("Gene") Parker, who led the field of solar physics into the space age, died on 15 March. He was 94. Gene was first to identify many of the fundamental concepts of Solar System plasma physics, including the physics of solar wind acceleration, coronal heating and magnetic reconnec-tion, cosmic ray diffusion, and a conceptual structure of the heliosphere and its interaction with the interstellar medium. His foundational work on the theory of the solar wind led to the flagship NASA mission that bears his name: the Parker Solar Probe. Gene was born in Houghton, Michigan, in 1927 and attended Michigan State University, where he received his 6S in physics in 1948. He earned his PhD at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1951 working with physicist Leverett Davis Jr. on problems of the interaction of dust with the interstellar medium. After a brief appointment at the University of Utah, Gene joined the faculty at the University of Chicago, where he remained until his retirement in 1995. Gene's early career coincided with the beginning of the space age. At that time, the prevailing wisdom was that interplanetary space was either a vacuum with sporadic solar perturbations or a solar atmosphere in hydrostatic equilibrium. However, subtle clues suggested something quite different. German astronomer Ludwig Biermann had made a convincing case that one component of a bifurcated comet tail always pointed away from the Sun, guided by a hypothetical "solar corpuscular radiation" whereas the other part was dominated by photon pressure and Kepler's laws.
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