Home - Solar Orbiter

23 November 2021Solar Orbiter is returning to Earth for a flyby before starting its main science mission to explore the Sun and its connection to ‘space weather’. During the flyby Solar Orbiter must pass through the clouds of space debris that surround our planet, making this manoeuvre the riskiest flyby yet for a science mission.

27 April 2021Computer simulations show that the miniature solar flares nicknamed ‘campfires’, discovered last year by ESA’s Solar Orbiter, are likely driven by a process that may contribute significantly to the heating of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona. If confirmed by further observations this adds a key piece to the puzzle of what heats the solar...

10 December 2020Solar Orbiter’s latest results show that the mission is making the first direct connections between events at the solar surface and what’s happening in interplanetary space around the spacecraft. It is also giving us new insights into solar ‘campfires’, space weather and disintegrating comets.

30 September 2020ESA has released its first Solar Orbiter data to the scientific community and the wider public. The instruments contributing to this data release are the Energetic Particle Detector (EPD), the Radio and Plasma Waves (RPW) instrument, and the Magnetometer (MAG). Data from the fourth in-situ instrument, the Solar Wind Plasma Analyser (SWA) will be...

16 July 2020The first images from Solar Orbiter, a new Sun-observing mission by ESA and NASA, have revealed omnipresent miniature solar flares, dubbed ‘campfires’, near the surface of our closest star. “These are only the first images and we can already see interesting new phenomena,” says Daniel Müller, ESA’s Solar Orbiter Project Scientist. “We didn’t...