13 September

1994: On 13 September 1994, ESA's Ulysses spacecraft reached a point less than 10 degrees from the Sun's south pole.

Just as the polar regions of Earth were the last to be explored, so it is with the Sun. Many spacecraft have investigated the stream of electric particles known as the solar wind. Ulysses, developed by ESA, built by European industry and flown in collaboration with NASA, was the first to fly through the solar wind coming from the poles.

As Ulysses reached its highest solar latitude of 80.2 degrees, researchers met at a scientific workshop in the Netherlands to assess the results from the nine experiments carried by the spacecraft.