Solar Orbiter’s main science goal is to explore the connection between the Sun and the heliosphere. Joining the dots Joining the dots of an energetic particle event It stretches 25 000 kilometres across the Sun and has a multitude of spikes of hot and colder gas that reach out in all directions. For now, it has been nicknamed ‘ the hedgehog’. One particularly eye-catching feature was seen during this perihelion. “Even if Solar Obiter stopped taking data tomorrow, I would be busy for years trying to figure all this stuff out,” says David Berghmans. Having spotted a feature or an event that they can’t immediately recognise, they must then dig through past solar observations by other space missions to see if anything similar has been seen before. This is no easy task because Solar Orbiter is revealing so much activity on the Sun at the small scale. The task now for the EUI team is to understand what they are seeing.
This region is where most of the solar activity that drives space weather takes place. “The images are really breathtaking,” says David Berghmans, Royal Observatory of Belgium, and the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument, which takes high-resolution images of the lower layers of the Sun's atmosphere, known as the solar corona. Image gallery below featuring the Sun's south pole, active regions, the Sun at perihelion and more – click individual images and movies for more information: Joining the dots – the 21 March energetic eventįorecasting space weather – the 10 March CME And as luck would have it, the spacecraft also soaked up several solar flares and even an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection, providing a taste of real-time space weather forecasting, an endeavour that is becoming increasingly important because of the threat space weather poses to technology and astronauts. When it comes to perihelion, clearly the closer the spacecraft gets to the Sun, the finer the details the remote sensing instrument can see. Some are remote-sensing instruments that look at the Sun, while others are in-situ instruments that monitor the conditions around the spacecraft, enabling scientists to ‘join the dots’ from what they see happening at the Sun, to what Solar Orbiter ‘feels’ at its location in the solar wind millions of kilometres away. Solar Orbiter carries ten science instruments – nine are led by ESA Member States and one by NASA – all working together in close collaboration to provide unprecedented insight into how our local star ‘works’.
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