Darmstadt: There are certain things we do know about our Sun: It is an unimaginably hot, blindingly bright ball of energy 150 million kilometres from Earth that provides the indispensable conditions required for all life on our planet.
It is the central star that powers our entire solar system — and yet, we still do not understand it fully. Late on February 9 eastern time, the Solar Orbiter is scheduled to take
off from the Cape Canaveral space station in Florida.
The joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Nasa is estimated to have cost almost 1.5 billion euros ($1.66 billion).
The mission aims to “address big questions in Solar System science to help us understand how our star creates and controls the giant bubble of plasma that surrounds the whole Solar System and influences the planets within it,” ESA says on its website.
The orbiter is kitted out with 10 scientific instruments and aims to take the first-ever high resolution pictures of the Sun’s poles.
All of this will be controlled out of the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, south-western Germany.
“We know a bit about of what happens on the Sun and we know a bit about what happens inside the Sun, including that it influences the Earth in many ways,” says Professor Sami Solanki, director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research.
However, the question of how the Sun operates remains largely unanswered.
“In this sense, we cannot make any predictions. That is, I cannot say whether tomorrow there will be a solar flare that could trigger this or that on the Earth two days later,” Solanki explains.
“Solar Orbiter will be a unique, first-time mission in many ways,” says Solanki, whose institute is involved in four of the 10 instruments on board the satellite.
One of these devices is a so-called Polarimetric and HelioseismicImager, with a hefty price tag of around 100 million euros, which is to capture images that reveal how the magnetic field on the Sun’s surface operates.
— dpa
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