Welcome to ESA's Solar Orbiter Website for the Scientific Community

On 18 February 2025, Solar Orbiter completed a successful Venus Gravity Assist Maneuver, bringing the mission to its high latitude science phase.

News and Highlights

Science nugget: Connecting Solar Orbiter and L1 measurements of mesoscale solar wind structures to their coronal source using the Adapt-WSA model

25 September 2024 Mesoscale structures are important tracers of solar wind formation because they retain signatures of their heating at their low coronal source, their release, and their acceleration through the high corona. A key observable to investigate the formation of mesoscale structures is the plasma's heavy ion composition and charge states. Solar... read more

Science nugget: Modelling the global structure of a coronal mass ejection observed by Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe

18 September 2024 Reconstructing the global structure of coronal mass ejections is not a straightforward task: as CMEs propagate through the heliosphere, they may undergo many processes that can lead to fundamental alterations or deformations of their structure. To truly understand the global structure of ICMEs and their evolution as they propagate through the... read more

Solar Orbiter shows how solar wind gets a magnetic push

29 August 2024 ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft has provided crucial data to answer the decades-long question of where the energy comes from to heat and accelerate the solar wind. Working in tandem with NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, Solar Orbiter reveals that the energy needed to help power this outflow is coming from large fluctuations in the Sun’s magnetic field. read more

Science nugget: Coordinated observations with the Swedish 1m Solar Telescope and Solar Orbiter

28 August 2024 The coordinated observations with Solar Orbiter took place in the period from October 12th to October 24th, 2023. Due to local seeing conditions and daily solar elevation in October, the observations were scheduled at 9 UT over 11 days in total. The weather conditions permitted observations on 7 of those 11 days. On 4 of these 7 days the seeing... read more

Science nugget: Multi-source connectivity drives heliospheric solar wind variability

21 August 2024 The remote-sensing observations and in situ measurements utilized in this analysis were taken as part of the Slow Solar Wind Connection Science Solar Orbiter Observing Plan. The Slow Wind SOOP operated for the first time during Solar Orbiter’s close perihelion passage in March 2022, when Solar Orbiter was at a close distance of approximately 0.5au. read more

Science nugget: Composition Mosaics from March 2022

14 August 2024 We focus our analysis on SPICE's first composition mosaic, taken on March 2, 2022 while SO was very close to its first perihelion, at around a heliocentric distance of 0.54 AU. We provide details on data and results, FIP-bias measurements, and future observation plans, building on previous methodologies for interpreting SPICE data. read more

Mark your calendars! Solar Orbiter Community Building webinars starting on 2/10/2024

12 July 2024 We are announcing the new Solar Orbiter Community Building webinars. The aim of these webinars is to provide news and insights on Solar Orbiter science and science operations to the wider solar and space physics communities. Starting on 2/10/2024. read more

Science nugget: Quantifying the diffusion of suprathermal electrons by whistler waves with Solar Orbiter

26 June 2024 In the solar wind, it is common to distinguish three categories of electron populations. The core represents the thermal electrons at low energies. The suprathermal electrons of the halo have higher energies and are often represented by kappa distributions. The Strahl is a beam of high-energy electrons that follows the magnetic field lines,... read more

Science nugget: Coordinated Coronal and Heliospheric Observations During the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse

19 June 2024 A total solar eclipse occurred on 2024 April 8th over North America that crossed several parts of Mexico, United States, and ended in the eastern part of Canada (Figure 1). The path of totality provides a unique opportunity to observe the solar corona with the naked eye while the fully occulted solar disk allows for detailed coronal observations... read more

Can't stop won't stop: Solar Orbiter shows the Sun raging on

18 June 2024 The hyperactive sunspot region responsible for the beautiful auroras earlier in May was still alive and kicking when it rotated away from Earth’s view. Watching from the other side of the Sun, the ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission detected this same region producing the largest solar flare of this solar cycle. By observing the Sun from all sides,... read more

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Upcoming Events

17 - 21 November 2025: Solar Orbiter hackathon at ESTEC

19 - 23 January 2026: ISRO - ESA Heliophysics workshop on Aditya-L1, Solar Orbiter and Proba-3

16-20 March 2026: Solar Orbiter Workshop #10 in Berlin, Germany

Latest data from EUI/FSI

Latest 30.4 nm image from Solar Orbiter EUI

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The Sun Now seen by SDO/AIA

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