After some 20 years of development
six years of construction
and more than a year of testing
Solar Orbiter is being readied for launch
from Cape Canaveral, Florida on an Atlas 5.
Built by Airbus in the UK,
engineers have had the challenging task
of designing a mission to make detailed observations
of the Sun
and capture the closest ever pictures of our
nearest star
and the first images of the poles.
The spacecraft has a number of key new technologies
that have been developed just for the purpose
of flying close to the Sun.
We have a specific heat shield
designed just for Solar Orbiter
that will reach temperatures of over 500 degrees Centigrade on the front side
and will keep things as cool as just about
50 degrees Centigrade on the backside
to protect the sensitive electronics.
The Sun generates a bubble of plasma,
enveloping the entire Solar System.
Known as the heliosphere,
anything within it
including Earth
is subject to a stream of charged particles
called the solar wind.
Violent space weather from flares
and coronal mass ejections
has the potential to damage satellites,
disrupt communications
and knock out power grids on the ground.
Solar Orbiter will help answer fundamental
questions about the Sun’s activity.
One of the key questions that scientists have
is how the heliosphere is actually generated
and how it's accelerating.
So, what is really driving the solar winds?
And the second key question of the mission is
understanding what makes the Sun change
or vary over this eleven-year cycle that we all know.
So, understanding the magnetic properties of the Sun
and how these changes
over these eleven-year cycle
is one of the key scientific objectives of
Solar Orbiter.
To measure the magnetic environment around the Sun,
Solar Orbiter is fitted with a suite of ten
extremely sensitive instruments.
And, so it can take pictures,
the heatshield has peepholes through it
covered by protective doors.
We are going to places where no other solar
telescopes have been before.
We are going to be very close to the Sun
to take very high-resolution images of the Sun.
Unprecedented spatial resolution.
And we are also going to fly over the poles of the Sun
regions that are very much unknown
because we don't see them very well from Earth,
but they are the source of the solar wind
and therefore very important.
Solar Orbiter will take several years
using the gravity of Venus and Earth
to reach its operational orbit
But once in position,
the spacecraft will take measurements
that complement NASA’s Parker Solar Probe,
which launched in 2018.
We will not get as close to the Sun,
but we will have a vastly bigger payload complement,
so more instruments
with more cameras looking at the Sun.
So, we will do science that is complementary
to Solar Probe
and the two will really have a great deal of synergy.
With launch preparations underway,
the engineers and scientists working on Solar Orbiter
can now look forward to their hard work
revealing our Sun as never before.
