ESA title

Solar Orbiter is the most complex scientific laboratory ever to have been sent to our life-giving star, taking images of the Sun from closer than any spacecraft before and being the first to look at its polar regions. With Solar Orbiter's ten instruments, scientists hope to answer some profound questions: What drives the Sun’s 11-year cycle of rising and subsiding magnetic activity? What heats up the upper layer of its atmosphere, the corona, to millions of degrees Celsius? How does solar wind form, and what accelerates it to speeds of hundreds of kilometres per second? And how does it all affect our planet?

  • Launch date: February 2020
  • First images: July 2020
  • Beginning of routine science operations: November 2021
  • Mission highlights: The closest ever images of the Sun, the first ever close-up images of the Sun’s polar regions, measuring the composition of the solar wind and linking it to its area of origin on the Sun’s surface
  • The closest distance to the Sun: 42 million kilometres
Solar Orbiter

Latest

Solar flare seen by Solar Orbiter
Science & Exploration

Catch solar bursts in new citizen science project

11/03/2025 7812 views 85 likes
Read
Solar Orbiter Venus flyby
Enabling & Support

Solar Orbiter ready for close encounter with Venus

18/02/2025 6350 views 64 likes
Read
The Sun's surface as seen by Solar Orbiter's PHI instrument
Science & Exploration

New full Sun views show sunspots, fields and restless plasm…

20/11/2024 102756 views 127 likes
Read
SOHO: 25 years of solar imaging
Science & Exploration

The solar cycle, a heartbeat of stellar energy

04/11/2024 3812 views 37 likes
Read
Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe
Science & Exploration

Solar Orbiter shows how solar wind gets a magnetic push

29/08/2024 5707 views 66 likes
Read

More items

  • Science & Exploration

    The Sun in high resolution

    24/03/2022 889331 views 13912 likes
    Open item
    The Sun in high resolution
  • Science & Exploration

    Solar Orbiter’s highest resolution image ever of the Sun’s south pole

    18/05/2022 43501 views 453 likes
    Open item
  • Science & Exploration

    Where is Solar Orbiter? Track ESA’s Sun explorer

    28/05/2020 42768 views 308 likes
    Open item
  • Science & Exploration

    Why we need Solar Orbiter

    02/09/2020 4205 views 16 likes
    Open item
    Solar Orbiter
  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4

Solar Orbiter overview