ESA-NASA joint solar mission to give first-ever look at Sun's poles

The seven-year-long mission will study the connection between the Sun and the Earth and also address big questions in Solar System science.

NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) announced today a new solar mission that will take first peek at the Sun’s north and south poles. This will be NASA’s second major mission, after the Parker Solar Probe, a scientific mission to unlock the mysteries of the Sun's corona and solar wind, that was launched in mid-2018.

Solar Orbiter, an international cooperative mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA is dedicated to solar and heliospheric physics. The spacecraft will be launched on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral on Feb. 7, 2020, at 11:15 p.m. EST, the US Space agency said in a statement.

The seven-year-long mission will study the connection between the Sun and the Earth and also address big questions in Solar System science.

The poles are particularly important for us to be able to model more accurately. For forecasting space weather events, we need a pretty accurate model of the global magnetic field of the Sun.

Holly Gilbert, NASA project scientist for the mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Solar Orbiter will use a combination of ten remote-sensing and in situ instruments that will operate continuously to observe the turbulent solar surface features including the solar wind, the heliospheric magnetic field, solar energetic particles, transient interplanetary disturbances, and the Sun's magnetic field. 

The Solar Orbiter will make a close approach to the Sun every five months. According to the ESA, Solar Orbiter will be able to observe the magnetic activity building up in the atmosphere that can lead to powerful flares and eruptions.

After years of technology development, it will be the closest any Sun-facing cameras have ever gotten to the Sun. ou can’t really get much closer than Solar Orbiter is going and still look at the Sun, said Daniel Müller, ESA project scientist for the mission at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands.

The spacecraft will also work with NASA's Parker Solar Probe, collecting complementary datasets that will allow more science to be distilled from the two missions than either could achieve on their own.

Throughout the mission, the spacecraft will use the gravity of Venus to slingshot it out of the plane of the Solar System, whilst following an elliptical orbit around the Sun, passing within the orbit of Mercury at its closest. The scientific instruments onboard the spacecraft will be protected by a custom-designed titanium heat shield that withstands temperatures over 900 degrees Fahrenheit as they face up to 13 times the heating of satellites in Earth orbit.