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
  • Completed milestones: First images released in 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 Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe
Science & Exploration

Solar Orbiter shows how solar wind gets a magnetic push

29/08/2024 4718 views 63 likes
Read
Solar Orbiter's view of active region AR3664
Science & Exploration

Can't stop won't stop: Solar Orbiter shows the Sun raging on

18/06/2024 6706 views 43 likes
Read
Solar Orbiter observes an active patch of the Sun
Science & Exploration

ESA’s Solar Orbiter traces solar wind to its source

28/05/2024 6957 views 28 likes
Read
Solar Orbiter captures giant solar eruption
Science & Exploration

Solar Orbiter to watch for eruptions during total eclipse

04/04/2024 3848 views 35 likes
Read
Enabling & Support

Solar Orbiter prepared for ‘worst-case scenario’

02/04/2024 3332 views 34 likes
Read

More items

  • Science & Exploration

    The Sun in high resolution

    24/03/2022 878097 views 13793 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 42879 views 450 likes
    Open item
  • Science & Exploration

    Where is Solar Orbiter? Track ESA’s Sun explorer

    28/05/2020 39948 views 296 likes
    Open item
  • Science & Exploration

    Why we need Solar Orbiter

    02/09/2020 3961 views 14 likes
    Open item
    Solar Orbiter

Solar Orbiter overview