Right before midnight on Sunday, a spacecraft will depart from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to the sun. Called Solar Orbiter, this spacecraft will spend the next 7 years dipping in and out of the extremely unwelcoming environment around the sun. While doing so, it will provide us with our first peek of the sun’s poles, which will be crucial to comprehending its topsy-turvy magnetic field. It will likewise assist reveal the origin of violent solar storms that send plasma hurtling towards Earth, where it can knock out satellites and disrupt our power grids
The Solar Orbiter objective is led by the European Space Agency and has been practically two decades in the making. It complements NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, released in 2018, which will pass closer to the sun than any spacecraft in history. Just a year into its objective, Parker is offering scientists with 4 times more information about the solar environment than expected, states Nour Raouafi, a heliophysicist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and Parker task scientist. “We are venturing into areas of area that we never checked out in the past,” says Raouafi. “Every observation is a prospective discovery.”
Solar Orbiter will augment Parker’s large chest of data with an array of 10 instruments, which include 6 that can directly image the sun. This is a luxury not available to Parker, which passes too near to the sun to straight image it without instantly frying a camera’s sensors. But Parker and Solar Orbiter are both gear up