![]() Solar Orbiter will be NASA’s second major mission to the inner solar system in recent years, following on August 2018’s launch of Parker Solar Probe. Five of the remote-sensing instruments look at the Sun through peepholes in that heat shield one observes the solar wind out to the side. To beat the heat, Solar Orbiter has a custom-designed titanium heat shield with a calcium phosphate coating that withstands temperatures over 900 degrees Fahrenheit - thirteen times the solar heating faced by spacecraft in Earth orbit. At closest approach the spacecraft will pass within 26 million miles of the Sun. Over the mission’s seven-year lifetime, Solar Orbiter will reach an inclination of 24 degrees above the Sun’s equator, increasing to 33 degrees with an additional three years of extended mission operations. Overview of the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter missionĬredits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Joy Ngĭownload this video in HD formats from NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio “You can’t really get much closer than Solar Orbiter is going and still look at the Sun,” Müller said. “We are going to be able to map what we ‘touch’ with the in situ instruments and what we ‘see’ with remote sensing,” said Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla, NASA deputy project scientist for the mission.Īfter years of technology development, it will be the closest any Sun-facing cameras have ever gotten to the Sun. ![]() Solar Orbiter, on the other hand, will pass inside the orbit of Mercury carrying four in situ instruments and six remote-sensing imagers, which see the Sun from afar. But Ulysses never got closer than Earth-distance to the Sun, and only carried what’s known as in situ instruments - like the sense of touch, they measure the space environment immediately around the spacecraft. Launched in 1990, the Ulysses spacecraft made three passes around our star before it was decommissioned in 2009. The only prior spacecraft to fly over the Sun’s poles was also a joint ESA/NASA venture. Observing the changing magnetic fields of the poles could offer an answer. “But we don’t understand why it’s 11 years, or why some solar maximums are stronger than others,” Gilbert said. Today, we know it as the approximately-11-year solar cycle in which the Sun transitions between solar maximum, when sunspots proliferate and the Sun is active and turbulent, and solar minimum, when they’re fewer and it’s calmer. In 1843, German astronomer Samuel Heinrich Schwabe discovered that the number of sunspots - dark blotches on the Sun’s surface marking strong magnetic fields - waxes and wanes in a repeating pattern. The Sun’s poles may also explain centuries-old observations. ![]() ![]() “For forecasting space weather events, we need a pretty accurate model of the global magnetic field of the Sun.” “The poles are particularly important for us to be able to model more accurately,” said Holly Gilbert, NASA project scientist for the mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The sidelong glimpse we get of the Sun’s poles from within the ecliptic plane leaves major gaps in the data. But their techniques work best with a straight-on view the steeper the viewing angle, the noisier the data. To prepare for arriving solar storms, scientists monitor the Sun’s magnetic field. Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Scientific Visualization Studio/Community-Coordinated Modeling Center ![]()
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