In Photos: NASA's Parker Solar Probe in the Clean Room

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Fuel for the Journey

Amy Thompson/Space.com

The ball structure inside is the full tank, which is filled with hydrazine to help propel the spacecraft. The pink section, which will be removed before flight, indicates that fuel is on board.

Time for Launch

Amy Thompson/Space.com

The team performed final checkouts of the spacecraft last week, before the probe shipped to the launch site.

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Amy Thompson
Amy Thompson
Contributing Writer

Amy Thompson is a Florida-based space and science journalist, who joined Space.com as a contributing writer in 2015. She's passionate about all things space and is a huge science and science-fiction geek. Star Wars is her favorite fandom, with that sassy little droid, R2D2 being her favorite. She studied science at the University of Florida, earning a degree in microbiology. Her work has also been published in Newsweek, VICE, Smithsonian, and many more. Now she chases rockets, writing about launches, commercial space, space station science, and everything in between.