Solar Orbiter Stories
Since the 1960s, astronomers have wondered how the Sun’s supersonic “solar wind,” a stream of energetic particles that flows out into the solar system, continues to receive energy once it leaves the Sun. Now, thanks to a lucky lineup of…
April 17, 2021, was a day like any other day on the Sun, until a brilliant flash erupted and an enormous cloud of solar material billowed away from our star. Such outbursts from the Sun are not unusual, but this…
For new Sun-watching spacecraft, the first solar eruption is always special. On February 12, 2021, a little more than a year from its launch, the European Space Agency and NASA’s Solar Orbiter caught sight of this coronal mass ejection, or…
Update, Jan. 28, 2021: A closer look by the Solar Orbiter team — prompted by sharp-eyed citizen scientists — revealed that a fourth planet, Uranus, is also visible in Solar Orbiter’s images from Nov. 18, 2020. Original story, Jan. 26,…
The first images from ESA/NASA’s Solar Orbiter are now available to the public, including the closest pictures ever taken of the Sun. Solar Orbiter is an international collaboration between the European Space Agency, or ESA, and NASA, to study our closest star,…
Download related materials from Feb. 7’s pre-launch science briefing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. It will be a dark winter’s night when Solar Orbiter launches from Florida on its journey to the source of all light on Earth, the Sun. The…
When Solar Orbiter launches on its journey to the Sun, there’s one key piece of engineering making this ESA-NASA mission possible: the heat shield. Seeking a view of the Sun’s north and south poles, Solar Orbiter will journey out of…
As we develop more and more powerful tools to peer beyond our solar system, we learn more about the seemingly endless sea of faraway stars and their curious casts of orbiting planets. But there’s only one star we can travel…