Solar Orbiter successfully completes historic close pass of the Sun nasaspaceflight.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nasaspaceflight.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Solar Orbiter is the first spacecraft to provide close-up views of the Sun’s polar regions, and addresses a central question of heliophysics: How does the Sun create and control the constantly changing space environment throughout the solar system?
The ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter mission, launched in February 2020, will explore the Sun and heliosphere from close up and from out of the ecliptic plane. It aims to address the overarching questions of how the Sun creates and controls the heliosphere, and why solar activity changes with time. Among the instruments that Solar Orbiter carries is the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (SO/PHI), which is the first magnetograph to leave the Sun-Earth line and to observe the Sun from different directions. Solar Orbiter is still in its cruise phase and SO/PHI is still undergoing various tests, improving its calibration procedures, etc. Nonetheless, already a few glimpses of SO/PHI’s capabilities have become apparent, including the excellent quality of the data. The promise for the science that can be done with SO/PHI data in the future is immense, both with standalone observations by SO/PHI and with SO/PHI data combined with observations made by other Solar Orbiter instruments, or with data