The first images on the mysteries of the Sun have been taken by Solar Orbiter. Last February, the space mission, the result of an international collaboration between ESA and NASA, has passed closer than ever to the sun and some have been detected by various instruments aboard the satellite coronal mass ejections. These are eruptions of particles from the solar atmosphere that explode in the solar system and they can potentially trigger space weather phenomena on Earth. The announcement came today from the European Space Agency.
A close passage to the perihelion of the Sun, on February 10, 2021, brought the spacecraft halfway between the Earth and the Sun and it was “a unique opportunity that allowed the teams to perform dedicated observations, to check the instrument settings and much more, to better prepare for the upcoming scientific phase” he points out. ‘Esa. In full scientific mode, remote sensing and in situ instruments will continuously carry out joint observations.
At the time of passing close to our star, the spacecraft was ‘behind’ the Sun as seen from Earth, which “resulted in very low data transfer rates. It therefore took a long time to fully download the close pass data, which is still being analyzed,” reports the European Space Agency.
By a happy coincidence, three of the Solar Orbiter’s remote sensing tools found a couple of coronal mass ejections in the days following the greatest degree of approach. The Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (Eui), Heliospheric Imager (SoloHi) and the coronagrafo Metis – which has the Italian contribution of INAF with the Italian Space Agency – have taken up various aspects of the two CMEs that occurred during the day.
Solar Orbiter was launched on February 10, 2020 and is currently in “cruising phase” in advance of the main scientific mission, which will begin next November. ESA recalls that while the four in situ instruments have remained in operation for most of the time since launch, collecting scientific data on the space environment near the spacecraft, the operations of the six remote sensing instruments in the “cruise phase” they are mainly aimed at instrument calibration, and are activated only during dedicated control windows and specific campaigns.