Jim raines his solar orbiter1/23/2024 ![]() He goes on to explain that the atmosphere of the Sun is ‘scale invariant’. “We hope to see ‘new’ features at smaller scales,” he says. And this is hopefully just a taste of things to come, says David Berghmans of the Royal Observatory of Belgium and the Principal Investigator of EUI. During the commissioning of the spacecraft, the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument took pictures that revealed the surface was covered in what looked like miniature solar flares. Getting closer to the Sun means that you can see it in more detail, and the closer Solar Orbiter gets, the more interesting the images and spectra from its remote sensing instruments are likely to be. Where the interesting physics starts Solar Orbiter’s first view of the Sun This unique combination will allow it to achieve its ambitious science goals. Only Solar Orbiter, which is designed to operate at around 42 million kilometres from the Sun carries both particle detectors and telescopes. However, the proximity means that Parker does not carry any cameras and telescopes to look directly at the Sun either because they simply would not work in the fearsome light and heat that the spacecraft will encounter. Eventually, it is expected to pass by at a searing 7 million kilometres - six times closer than Solar Orbiter. This spacecraft is currently shooting past the Sun at ever decreasing distances. ![]() Neither is Solar Orbiter going as close to the Sun as NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. Instead it only sampled the particles and electromagnetic processes that could be found at that close distance to the Sun. Crucially, however, it did not carry any telescopes or cameras that looked directly at the solar surface. In 1976, the Helios-B spacecraft flew within a distance of 43 million km. Yet Solar Orbiter is not the first spacecraft to fly so close to the Sun. And that meant it took a long time for technology to develop and be in place in order to make the mission possible. “It was a very ambitious mission concept,” says Daniel Müller, ESA Project Scientist for Solar Orbiter. The desire to get closer to the Sun has been studied at ESA since the late 1990s. The designers of Solar Orbiter recognised that these mysteries can be addressed by getting closer to the Sun and immersing the spacecraft in the solar environment. Two of the key mysteries that Solar Orbiter is designed to answer is how the Sun heats its outer atmosphere, the corona, to a temperature of a million degrees and how it accelerates the electrically charged particles that make up the solar wind. While these missions have provided us with incredible insights and allowed scientists to develop excellent descriptions of the Sun’s behaviour, they have left us with fundamental questions to answer. In 2010, NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory into an orbit around Earth. This gives the spacecraft an uninterrupted view of the Sun. This is a point in space, around 1.5 million kilometres closer to the Sun than Earth, in which gravitational and rotational forces balance so that the spacecraft can orbit the Sun at the same rate as Earth. For example, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), the joint ESA/NASA mission launched in 1995, is in orbit around the Sun-Earth L1 point. Until Solar Orbiter, most solar spacecraft have remained in the vicinity of Earth. The shortcomings of studying the Sun from Earth’s orbit
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