NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are releasing new images of the sun on Thursday morning, bringing humans closer to our host star than ever before. The photos are the first captured by Solar Orbiter, which was released earlier this year.
After its launch on February 9, Solar Orbiter made its first close move to the sun in mid-June, despite the team facing setbacks due to the coronavirus pandemic. When the sun came up, he turned on all 10 of his instruments for the first time, the agencies said in a statement.
Agencies said the new photos are the closest ever taken from the sun. They will be released Thursday at 8 am EDT.
“The first images are exceeding our expectations,” Daniel Müller, a scientist at the Solar Orbiter Project at ESA, said in a statement. “We can already see indications of very interesting phenomena that we have not been able to observe in detail before. The 10 instruments on board the Solar Orbiter work wonderfully, and together they provide a holistic view of the Sun and the solar wind. This makes us feel confident that the Solar Orbiter It will help us answer deep open questions about the Sun. “
ESA / ATG Medialab
During its first orbit, the Solar Orbiter approached 47 million miles from the star’s surface, about half the distance from the sun to Earth. ESA said the satellite will eventually get much closer to the sun.
Now that it has completed its first step, the spacecraft is slowly adjusting its orbit. In late 2021, it will approach 26 million miles from the sun’s surface, closer than the planet Mercury, to observe the first proper view of the star’s poles.
Scientists hope the mission can help answer some of your most important questions about the development of planets, the rise of life, the inner workings of our solar system, and the origins of the universe and how it works.
The images are not the only new images we have of the sun. In June, NASA released a 10-year interval video of the star, captured by the agency’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
SDO collected 425 million high-resolution images of the sun, 20 million gigabytes of data, over the course of a decade. He took a new image of the sun every 0.75 seconds, leading to the spectacular composite video.
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