A spacecraft was able to achieve its first close approach to the sun, as it was orbiting around it, and photographed the event in great detail.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar Orbiter entered the close encounter, known as perihelion, on March 26, coming some 48 million kilometers (30 million miles), within Mercury’s orbit.
Temperatures near it, about 500 degrees Celsius (930 degrees Fahrenheit).
As it spins around its orbit, the spacecraft sees the sun like we’ve never seen it before – including a fascinating and mysterious feature called the “hedgehog”, and detailed views of usually hidden solar poles.
According to the journal Science Alert, these new observations, taken using the Solar Orbiter’s ten scientific instruments working together for the first time, will provide a wealth of data to extract the sun’s activity, including land magnetic fields, and the sometimes chaotic weather that explodes in space between planets.
The European Space Agency (ESA) released a video of the event, to get a comprehensive view of the solar probe. The Solar Orbiter is set to make a huge difference in solar energy science.
For example, because of Earth’s vantage point in orbit around the sun’s equator, it’s very difficult to study its poles.. Only spacecraft orbiting and below the sun can see those regions.
Polar regions are believed to be very important regions for solar magnetic fields, which play a large role in solar activity. However, due to the difficulty of seeing the poles, we don’t know what happens to the magnetic fields there. And with its suite of tools, the Solar Orbiter offers unprecedented insight into these mysterious regions.
Her view of the solar south pole on March 30 revealed a region filled with zigzag magnetic field lines that project away from the sun.
“The images are really amazing,” says solar physicist David Bergmans of the Royal Belgian Observatory. “Even if the Solar Obiter stopped taking data tomorrow, I’d be busy for years trying to figure out all these things.”
The main goal of the Solar Orbiter is to help scientists understand the Sun’s influence on the entire heliosphere, or the field of solar influence determined by the solar wind, whose boundaries lie outside the orbit of Pluto.
And when he approached perihelion, on March 21, he detected a flux of energetic particles, and even from this distance, the discovery was clear. The most energetic particles arrived first, followed by the least energetic particles. This indicates that the particles were not produced near the Solar Orbiter, but near the surface of the Sun.
“We are very pleased with the quality of the data from our first perihelion,” says heliophysicist Daniel Muller, ESA solar vehicle project scientist.