Scientists hope that studying the sun's polar regions up close will shed light on the mysterious forces driving the sun's magnetic field, which in turns drives the generation of sunspots, solar flares and eruptions.Animation showing the trajectory of Solar Orbiter around the Sun, highlighting the gravity assist manoeuvres that will enable the spacecraft to change inclination to observe the Sun from different perspectives.ĭuring the initial cruise phase, which lasts until November 2021, Solar Orbiter will perform two gravity-assist manoeuvres around Venus and one around Earth to alter the spacecraft’s trajectory, guiding it towards the innermost regions of the Solar System. The mission takes the closest ever images of the star and in a few years will take a look a the star's poles - the world's first. Solar Orbiter, on the other hand, travelling in the vacuum of space has a perfectly clear view of the star. This is because that light gets absorbed by Earth's atmosphere before it reaches the telescopes' lenses. The new EUI imaging mode, however, allows scientists to peer into regions of the atmosphere that are much closer to the sun's surface than what such rare events and conventional coronagraphs allow.ĮUI images the sun in very high resolution, and although Earth-based telescopes with large mirrors can study the sun's surface in even greater resolution, they can't observe the fascinating high-energy, ultraviolet light that EUI sees. Observers on Earth can naturally see the outermost parts of the sun's atmosphere during total solar eclipses. Solar Orbiter to look at Venus' magnetic field as it swings by the planet The sun crackles in new images from spacecraft preparing for a close flyby That allowed scientists to combine the images and study the links between phenomena observed on the surface and in the atmosphere. Solar Orbiter, for comparison, follows an elliptical orbit that periodically takes the spacecraft within the orbit of the solar system's innermost planet, Mercury.īy coincidence, STEREO happened to be looking at the sun from the same angle as Solar Orbiter was during the experiments with the new EUI imaging mode. In the video sequence obtained through the new imaging mode, scientists combined the Solar Orbiter's EUI view of the sun's atmosphere with an image of the star taken by NASA's STEREO mission, which orbits the sun at a slightly closer distance than Earth does. When the shutter opens only halfway, this thumb obscures the sun's disk, allowing EUI to see with great clarity the faint solar atmosphere. The scientists added a tiny protruding "thumb" to the instruments shutter. "It is actually a very simple modification to the instrument." "I had the idea to just do it and see if it would work," Auchère said in a European Space Agency (ESA) statement. "There must be some secrets in there that we can now find."ĮUI science team member Frédéric Auchère, an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Université Paris-Sud in France, described the new imaging mode as a result of "a hack," a last-minute modification devised before the launch of Solar Orbiter in early 2020. "Physics is changing there, the magnetic structures are changing there, and we never really had a good look at it before," David Berghmans, EUI principal investigator and solar physicist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, said in the statement. But it is in the part of the light spectrum that is only visible to EUI that scientists can study the most intriguing phenomena that occur at the boundary between the sun's atmosphere and its surface.
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