Solar Orbiter is the most complex scientific laboratory ever sent to our life-giving star, taking images of the Sun from closer than any spacecraft before and being the first to look at its polar regions.
With Solar Orbiter's ten instruments, scientists are answering 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? How does solar wind form, and what accelerates it to speeds of hundreds of kilometres per second? And how does it all affect our planet?
Solar Orbiter’s widest high-resolution view of the Sun
While it is undoubtedly a great achievement to operate so close to the Sun, the question remains, why do something so risky with a €1.5 billion euro spacecraft when you can take images of the Sun from Earth? The answer, of course, is science.
