Published: 24th Feb, 2020
- A rocket carrying Solar Orbiter, a probe that will take pictures of the top and bottom of the sun, launched on 9th February 2020.
Context
- A rocket carrying Solar Orbiter, a probe that will take pictures of the top and bottom of the sun, launched on 9th February 2020.
- It was a successful beginning to a mission that is a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency.
- Solar Orbiter is a mission dedicated to solar and heliospheric physics.
- It was selected as the first medium-class mission of ESA's Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 Programme.
- With Solar Orbiter, scientists will for the first time get a good view of the top and bottom of the sun.
- The spacecraft - called Solar Orbiter - is a European Space Agency-led mission - and was assembled at Airbus in Stevenage, England.
- The mission is expected to complete 22 orbits of the sun in 10 years.
- Ulysses, an earlier collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency launched in 1990, also passed over the sun’s poles, but at much farther distances, and it did not carry a camera.
- Occasionally, the sun erupts giant amounts of particles known as coronal mass ejections. The largest one known to hit Earth was the Carrington event in 1859, named after one of the people who observed an intensely bright spot on the sun where the eruption occurred.
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