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Mission: To study the Sun up close and from high latitudes, providing the first images of the Sun’s poles and investigating the heliosphere

Partnerships: Solar Orbiter is an ESA mission with strong NASA participation

Spacecraft

Launch mass: 1800 kg

Science payload mass: 209 kg

Body: 2.5 x 3.1 x 2.7 m

Total length with solar arrays deployed: 18 m

Solar panels: six, each 2.1 x 1.2 m

Payload power: 180 W

Instrument boom: 4.4 m

Radio and plasma wave antennas: three, each 6.5 m

Journey

Launch: February 2020

Vehicle: Atlas 5, Cape Canaveral

Flybys: Multiple gravity assists with Venus will increase Solar Orbiter’s inclination out of the plane of the Solar System by 24º (nominal mission) to 33º (extended mission)

Closest approaches: Solar Orbiter will make a close approach of the Sun every six months. Its distance from the Sun varies from within the orbit of Mercury to close to the orbit of Earth.

Science instruments

EPD: Energetic Particle Detector – PI: Javier Rodríguez-Pacheco, University of Alcalá, Spain

EUI: Extreme Ultraviolet Imager – PI: Pierre Rochus, Centre Spatial de Liège, Belgium

MAG: Magnetometer– PI: Tim Horbury, Imperial College London, United Kingdom

Metis: Coronagraph – PI: Marco Romoli, INAF – University of Florence, Italy

PHI: Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager – PI: Sami Solanki, Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung, Germany

RPW: Radio and Plasma Waves– PI: Milan Maksimovic, LESIA, Observatoire de Paris, France

SoloHI: Heliospheric Imager – PI: Russell A. Howard, US Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D.C., USA

SPICE: Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment – European-led facility instrument

STIX: X-ray Spectrometer/Telescope – PI: Säm Krucker, FHNW, Windisch, Switzerland

SWA: Solar Wind Plasma Analyser – PI: Christopher Owen, Mullard Space Science Laboratory, United Kingdom

Mission facts

Solar Orbiter is helping us understand how our star creates and controls the giant bubble of plasma that surrounds the whole Solar System and influences the planets within it
Solar Orbiter is taking the first images of the Sun’s poles from high latitudes
Solar Orbiter is combining in situ measurements of the solar wind around the spacecraft with remote sensing, looking at the Sun’s features from afar, to connect the two together
At closest approach, Solar Orbiter will be about approximately 42 million km from the Sun
The spacecraft has been tested to withstand temperatures up to 500 ºC – it endures thirteen times the amount of solar heating that satellites in Earth’s orbit experience
A specially designed black heatshield protects the spacecraft and its instruments from the heat of the Sun
Solar Orbiter is providing context information for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which collects data closer to the Sun, but does not have any Sun-pointing cameras

Sun facts

Our Sun is one of billions of stars that exist in our Milky Way galaxy
The Sun contains 99.9% of all matter in our Solar System
We live in the extended atmosphere of the Sun, a region of space known as the heliosphere
The primary energy the Earth receives from the Sun is light
During a single second, the Sun converts four million tonnes of matter into energy
The Sun rotates on its axis approximately once every 27 days
The Sun’s surface rotates at different speeds in different latitudes. The fastest rotation is at the equator and takes about 25 days; the slowest rotation is at the poles and takes about 36 days
The Sun sometimes ejects large packets of plasma from its surface; when directed towards Earth we experience ‘space weather’ which can disrupt satellites and critical infrastructure like power grids

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