The European Solar Orbiter probe, whose objective is to study the Sun, marked a milestone this Saturday, March 26, by approaching only 48 million kilometers from the star, a moment that it will record with its ten instruments and observation cameras, although the data they will take weeks to be downloaded and analyzed.
“It is the first time that the mission is going to be so close, less than a third of the distance from the Sun to Earth,” Javier Rodríguez-Pacheco, astrophysicist at the University of Alcalá (Madrid), principal investigator, told the EFE agency. of the Energetic Particle Detector (EPD), one of Solar Orbiter’s instruments.
The time of closest approach is expected at 11:49 GMT, said the scientist, and the distance will be 0.3 astronomical units, the distance that separates the Earth from the Sun, almost 150 million kilometers. Never before has a camera been so close to our star.
Launched in February 2020, the ship of the European Space Agency (ESA) It has already reached its final orbit and, following its first perihelion today, it will be repeated every six months. During its next close pass to the Sun, in October, it will come even a little closer, to regarding 42 million kilometers.
In each of its approaches, Solar Orbiter will be closer to the Sun than Mercury, but since this is the first time “we are very excited,” Rodríguez-Pacheco acknowledged.
scopes
The mission is coordinated by ESA’s ESOC mission control center in Germany and the science operations center of the European Center for Planetary Science and Space Astronomy in Madrid.
Solar Orbiter set its first record in 2020, when it was 77 million kilometers from the star, but now, with greater proximity, the images and data that collect will be more accurate.
At that time, scientists discovered that mini-eruptions occur near the surface of the Sun, which they informally called “bonfires” or “bonfires”, still under study.
Rodríguez-Pacheco does not rule out unexpected things being discovered in this new approach: “We are open to everything. Whenever you send a mission with instrumentation that has never been there before, you can expect anything.”
One of Solar Orbiter’s objectives is to begin to provide answers to some unknowns, for example how the solar wind accelerateswhich is the continuous flow of energetic particles emitted by the solar corona, its outer atmosphere, or why it is so much hotter than the surface.
The large amount of data collected by the spacecraft will take at least two weeks to download to Earth.
Solar Orbiter will not be the spacecraft that comes closest to the Sun, as that honor went last December to Nasa’s Parker Solar Probe, which reached just over five million kilometers and flew through its corona, but the big difference is that the European mission take cameras to look at the starRodríguez-Pacheco highlighted.
more resolution
“We intend to be able to observe the Sun with a resolution that we have never seen before”, for which the ten instruments that make up the equipment will be working.
One of them is the EPD, whose main researcher is Rodríguez-Pacheco, whose mission is to study the composition, flows and variations of the energetic particles emitted by the Sun, in order to be able to predict in advance solar storms.
The Sun is having more and more activity and the EPD precisely measures the energetic particles produced by it, which, added to the proximity of the probe, allows us to observe “details so fine that they escape us on Earth”.
Solar Orbiter will continue in its orbit until 2025 when it will begin to rise from the ecliptic, the plane where the planets orbit, to gradually rise and be able to observe, for the first time, the poles of our star.
