FP TrendsJuly 22, 2020 08:58:31 IST
To fill the massive gaps in our understanding of the Sun, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched the Solar Orbiter mission on February 9, 2020.
The spacecraft completed its first close pass of the Sun in mid-June and the first images have now been released, including the closest images ever taken of the Sun.
“These amazing images will help scientists reconstruct the Sun’s atmospheric layers, which is important for understanding how it drives space weather near Earth and throughout the solar system.” said Holly Gilbert, NASA project scientist for the mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The ‘bonfires’ detected by the Solar Orbiter are annotated with white arrows. Image: NASA / ESA
At the time the images were captured, the spacecraft was only 77 million km from the Sun, Daily science reported.
An instrument called the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) on the Solar Orbiter captured this first image, showing “bonfires” during its first perihelion, the spacecraft’s position in its elliptical orbit where it is closest to the Sun.
“Campfires are small relatives of the solar flares that we can observe from Earth, millions or billions of times smaller.” Daily science aforementioned David Berghmans of the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB), principal investigator of the EUI instrument, as he said.
Berghmans also said the Sun might look calm at first glance, but those miniature flares can be seen everywhere “when we look closely.”
The Solar Orbiter is returning its first scientific data, including images of the Sun taken from closer than any spacecraft in history. Image: NASA / ESA
Scientists are not sure if these campfires are just small versions of large flares or if they are generated due to a completely different mechanism that is not yet known.
ESA Solar Orbiter project scientist Daniel Müller said they did not expect these results so early, adding that the photos show the spacecraft is “off to an excellent start.”
According to EurekAlert, The coronavirus pandemic posed multiple challenges to the mission. It led to the closure of mission control at the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, for more than a week. Due to the COVID-19 situation, the teams involved in the mission also had to perform some critical operations remotely.
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