![]() ![]() ![]() This week, a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal unveiled four dozen additional studies about the mission. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Īnd in December, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe released the first of its observations, collected while orbiting extremely close to the sun. In movie form, those images reveal the sun’s skin to be a slowly bubbling, patchworked surface, with plasma cells the size of Texas. Inouye Solar Telescope, or DKIST, released a mesmerizing close-up of the solar surface. You may have noticed the sun is very hip right now. “Having this sort of coordinated push makes huge, huge changes in the amount of science you can do.” Golden era for sun study “It is just a really good time to be a heliophysicist,” says Nicola Fox, NASA’s heliophysics division director. SolO is launching during an especially hot moment in solar monitoring it’s just one of several new projects set on staring at the sun, offering opportunities for even more robust scientific exploration of our home star. “Understanding these fundamental processes, the physical processes taking place in the inner region of the solar atmosphere, is really going to help us,” says Holly Gilbert, NASA project scientist for SolO. Right now, humans are not so good at predicting when or how strongly those eruptions will affect the planet. Changes in the sun’s magnetic activity factor into the powerful, energetic solar eruptions that can knock out power grids, bring down satellites, and prove lethal to humans in outer space. Untangling these drivers isn’t simply an academic matter it can improve public safety on Earth. What would happen if it disappeared entirely? Learn about the star at the center of our solar system, and how it is critical to all life as we know it. “Hopefully, we’re filling in that gap with Solar Orbiter.” “We fundamentally really don’t understand that,” says ESA’s Daniel Müller, SolO project scientist. It will also help answer what controls the sun’s 11-year magnetic cycle, which varies in intensity and creates unanticipated fluctuations in solar activity. ![]() The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, or SolO, is about to change that, as it is designed to perform a detailed reconnaissance of the sun that will allow it to see the star’s previously invisible polar regions.įrom this unique vantage point, SolO’s suite of 10 instruments will help uncover how the star sends streams of energetic particles called the solar wind throughout our planetary system. On Sunday evening, a rocket lit up Florida’s nighttime sky as it ferried a spacecraft toward a first-of-its-kind adventure to the sun.Įven though our home star smolders every day in our skies, humans have only ever seen the sun from one perspective: face-on, from within the plane of the planets. ![]()
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