Solar Orbiter liftoff

ESA’s new Sun exploring spacecraft Solar Orbiter launched atop the US Atlas V 411 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 04:03 GMT (05:03 CET) on 10 February 2020. An ESA-led mission with strong NASA participation, Solar Orbiter will look at some of the never-before-seen regions of the Sun, such as the poles, and attempt to shed more light on the origins of solar wind, which can knock out power grids on the ground and disrupt operations of satellites orbiting the Earth. The spacecraft will take advantage of the gravitational pull of Venus to adjust its orbit to obtain unprecedented views of the solar surface.