BBC: It’s taken a little longer than expected but the Solar Orbiter probe is built and ready to begin testing.
UK engineers are putting the finishing touches to the satellite this week before sending it to Germany to begin a year-long test campaign.
Such attention to detail is necessary because of the punishing conditions the spacecraft will experience when studying our star’s inner workings.SolO is going to fly to within 43 million km of the solar surface.
In doing so, the heatshield on the front of the European Space Agency (Esa) satellite will have to cope with temperatures of up to 600C.If you’re thinking, “but I thought we just launched a probe to study the Sun” – you’d be right. That was the US space agency’s (Nasa) Parker satellite, which left Earth in August.
The two missions actually have very similar goals – and on many occasions will be working hand in glove, trying to understand what drives our star’s activity.
Parker will do it by going even closer than SolO, to within 7 million km of the solar surface.
This will allow the American probe to sit directly in and sample the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona.
This is the place where the “solar wind” – the storm of charged particles (plasma) and the magnetic fields they carry – get accelerated and blown out into space.
Solar Orbiter, on the other hand, will stand back somewhat to provide the wider context for what Parker is sensing.
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