ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission observes the Sun more closely than any previous European satellite. The sophisticated probe, which carries ten instruments to image the surface of our star and measure the properties of the environment in its neighborhood, has captured the first images of coronal mass ejections, fired particles that can cause space weather events. on earth.
The space probe was launched on February 10, 2020 and is currently in the cruise phase, heading for its main scientific mission, which will begin this same month of November 2021.
Launched into space by an Atlas V rocket, Solar Orbiter unfolds its 18 meter long solar array (measured end to end), as well as a set of antennas and an instrument arm, as it embarks and continues on its cruise towards the Sun .
The spacecraft will come within 42 million kilometers of the Sun, about a quarter of the distance between the Sun and Earth, allowing it to see some of the Sun’s never-before-photographed regions, including the poles.
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The instruments look at our star through small windows with a 30 cm thick titanium foil shield.
The ejections observed during perihelion on February 10, 201, the moment of approach to the Sun, were observed by ESA’s Proba-2 satellite and ESA / NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) from the “front” face. from the Sun, while NASA’s STEREO-A observatory also saw part of these events, which has allowed us to obtain a global view of what happened, explains ESA.
