ESA title

Solar Orbiter is the most complex scientific laboratory ever to have been sent to the Sun. Although our life-giving star has been an object of scientific interest for centuries, its behaviour still presents a puzzle for scientists. Solar Orbiter will take images of the Sun from closer than any spacecraft before and for the first time look at its uncharted polar regions. By combining observations from Solar Orbiter’s six remote-sensing instruments and four sets of in situ instruments, scientists hope to find answers to some profound questions: What drives the Sun’s 11-year cycle of rising and subsiding magnetic activity? What heats up the upper layer of its atmosphere, the corona, to millions of degrees Celsius? What drives the generation of the solar wind? What accelerates the solar wind to speeds of hundreds of kilometres per second? And how does it all affect our planet?

  • Launch date: February 2020
  • Completed milestones: First images released in July 2020
  • Beginning of routine science operations: November 2021
  • Mission highlights: The closest ever images of the Sun, the first ever close-up images of the Sun’s polar regions, measuring the composition of the solar wind and linking it to its area of origin on the Sun’s surface
  • The closest distance to the Sun: 42 million kilometres
Solar Orbiter

Latest

Solar Orbiter captures giant solar eruption
Science & Exploration

Solar Orbiter to watch for eruptions during total eclipse

04/04/2024 833 views 9 likes
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Enabling & Support

Solar Orbiter prepared for ‘worst-case scenario’

02/04/2024 2064 views 26 likes
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Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe
Science & Exploration

ESA and NASA team up to study solar wind

28/03/2024 2171 views 28 likes
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Metis observes the Sun’s corona
Science & Exploration

Solar Orbiter closes in on the solution to a 65-year-old so…

14/09/2023 12298 views 105 likes
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Science & Exploration

Camera ‘hack’ lets Solar Orbiter peer deeper into Sun’s atm…

06/09/2023 11067 views 86 likes
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More items

  • Science & Exploration

    The Sun in high resolution

    24/03/2022 858696 views 13590 likes
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    The Sun in high resolution
  • Science & Exploration

    Solar Orbiter’s highest resolution image ever of the Sun’s south pole

    18/05/2022 41880 views 441 likes
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  • Science & Exploration

    Where is Solar Orbiter? Track ESA’s Sun explorer

    28/05/2020 36401 views 272 likes
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  • Science & Exploration

    Why we need Solar Orbiter

    02/09/2020 3661 views 13 likes
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    Solar Orbiter

Solar Orbiter overview