Then, for three more years, the orbiter will swing closer to the sun’s poles, providing scientists with their first head-on views of those regions. The spacecraft will launch in August 2022 and travel about 1.5 billion miles (2.4 billion kilometers) over three and a half years to get to the asteroid, which scientists believe may be part of the core of a planetesimal, the building block of an early rocky planet. The spacecraft will pass close to the sun roughly every five to six months through 2026. Previously, different telescopes would detect these separately over days.īy connecting the sequence of events into “a complete story,” Berghmans says, scientists can better predict the outflows of those charged particles, which are especially dangerous to astronauts, satellites and even high-flying aircraft. Solar Orbiter’s instruments detected the solar flare, the shock wave it created and the produced burst of charged particles and radio signals - one after another - over several hours. The spacecraft’s focus is “connection science,” he says. To understand it, Solar Orbiter is traveling as close as 26 million miles from the Sun, inside the orbit of Mercury to measure the magnetic fields, waves, energetic particles and plasma escaping the Sun while they are still in their pristine state, before being modified and mixed in their long journey from the Sun. This is what the spacecraft was built to do, Berghmans says. Several days before spying the 25,000-kilometer-wide hedgehog, four of Solar Orbiter’s instruments detected an X-ray flare and observed how it affected nearby space. The 460-pound probe will take unprecedented measurements of the mysterious solar forces that radiate throughout the. EUI and STIX teams/Solar Orbiter/ESA and NASA It will fly as close as 26 million miles (42 million kilometers) to the sun. The spacecraft’s ultraviolet instrument also captured the shock wave (shown as the green outward-moving material) created by the flare. Heres a timeline of the mission: February 9, 2020: An Atlas V 411 rocket will launch the Solar Orbiter from SLC-41 atCape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. On March 21, the Solar Orbiter detected an X-ray flare (marked in red and blue) at the sun’s edge. Launched in February 2020 from Cape Canaveral, a 1.
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