Artist Melanie King and solar physicist Lucie Green

Artist Melanie King has reimagined representations of the scientific instruments aboard the ESA-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft, painted using light-sensitive chemicals and illuminated with ultraviolet light. She created the artwork in collaboration with Lucie Green, a professor of physics at University College London who is involved with Solar Orbiter. 

Solar Orbiter is the most complex scientific laboratory ever to have been sent to the Sun. Launched in February 2020, it is due to start scientific operations in November and to approach as close as 42 million kilometres to our nearest star.

It will capture solar images from closer than any spacecraft ever before and, for the first time, examine the Sun’s uncharted polar regions.

The results could help researchers to understand what drives the Sun’s 11-year cycle of rising and subsiding magnetic activity that generates sunspots and how the solar wind arises.