Home - Solar Orbiter

18 May 2022Powerful flares, breathtaking views across the solar poles, and a curious solar ‘hedgehog’ are amongst the haul of spectacular images, movies and data returned by Solar Orbiter from its first close approach to the Sun. Although the analysis of the new dataset has only just started, it is already clear that the ESA-led mission is providing the...

16 May 2022Solar Orbiter’s latest images shows the full Sun in unprecedented detail. They were taken on 7 March, when the spacecraft was crossing directly between the Earth and Sun at a distance of roughly 75 million kilometres, half way between our world and its parent star. The high-resolution telescope of EUI takes pictures of such high spatial...

16 May 2022The ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft is speeding towards its historic first close pass of the Sun. On 14 March, the spacecraft will pass the orbit of Mercury, the scorched inner planet of our Solar System, and on 26 March it will reach closest approach to the Sun. On 26 March, Solar Orbiter will be less than one-third of the distance from the...

16 May 2022The ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft has captured the largest solar prominence eruption ever observed in a single image together with the full solar disc. This latest event took place on 15 February and extended millions of kilometres into space. The coronal mass ejection was not directed at Earth. In fact, it is travelling away from us. There...

23 November 2021Solar Orbiter is returning to Earth for a flyby before starting its main science mission to explore the Sun and its connection to ‘space weather’. During the flyby Solar Orbiter must pass through the clouds of space debris that surround our planet, making this manoeuvre the riskiest flyby yet for a science mission.

27 April 2021Computer simulations show that the miniature solar flares nicknamed ‘campfires’, discovered last year by ESA’s Solar Orbiter, are likely driven by a process that may contribute significantly to the heating of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona. If confirmed by further observations this adds a key piece to the puzzle of what heats the solar...

10 December 2020Solar Orbiter’s latest results show that the mission is making the first direct connections between events at the solar surface and what’s happening in interplanetary space around the spacecraft. It is also giving us new insights into solar ‘campfires’, space weather and disintegrating comets.

30 September 2020ESA has released its first Solar Orbiter data to the scientific community and the wider public. The instruments contributing to this data release are the Energetic Particle Detector (EPD), the Radio and Plasma Waves (RPW) instrument, and the Magnetometer (MAG). Data from the fourth in-situ instrument, the Solar Wind Plasma Analyser (SWA) will be...

16 July 2020The first images from Solar Orbiter, a new Sun-observing mission by ESA and NASA, have revealed omnipresent miniature solar flares, dubbed ‘campfires’, near the surface of our closest star. “These are only the first images and we can already see interesting new phenomena,” says Daniel Müller, ESA’s Solar Orbiter Project Scientist. “We didn’t...

30 June 2020ESA’s Solar Orbiter has successfully completed four months of painstaking technical verification, known as commissioning. Despite the challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the spacecraft is now ready to begin performing science as it continues its cruise towards the Sun.