Over the past few decades, astronomy found itself on a long run of wonders. We have witnessed so many tremendous discoveries in this golden era. The historic first photo of a black hole, something that previously thought to be impossible, became reality. Yet the Sun, the brightest object to earthlings, succeeded in keeping many of its mysteries and secrets beyond our reach. Now, scientists have decided that it’s time to unravel some of them. As a result of that, the international collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA gave birth to a hero named “Solar Orbiter Spacecraft”.
Solar Orbiter has launched successfully on 10th February of this year with a goal of understanding the connections and the coupling between the Sun and the heliosphere. It will be the first spacecraft to study the sun’s polar zones. Solar Orbiter carries 10 instruments, comprising 6 remote-sensing and 4 in-situ ones. The remote-sensing payload consists of an extreme-ultraviolet full-Sun and high-resolution imager (EUI), a coronagraph (Metis), a polarimetric and helioseismic imager (PHI), a heliospheric imager (SoloHI), an extreme-UV spectral imager (SPICE) and an X-ray telescope and spectrometer (STIX). The in-situ instruments comprise a solar wind analyser (SWA), a magnetometer (MAG), a radio and plasma waves (RPW) experiment and the energetic particle detector (EPD) suite. Hopefully, these instruments will help us in observing the turbulent solar surface, the Sun’s hot outer atmosphere & changes in the solar wind and in answering the following four top-level scientific questions:
#. What drives the solar wind, and where does the
coronal magnetic field originate?
#. How do solar transients drive heliospheric
variability?
#. How do solar eruptions produce the
energetic particle radiation that fills the heliosphere?
#. How do the solar dynamo work and derive
connections between the Sun and the
heliosphere?
First measurements by a Solar Orbiter science instrument reached the ground on Thursday 13 February providing a confirmation that the magnetometer on board is in good health following successful deployment of the spacecraft’s instrument boom. Three of the 4 ‘in situ’ instruments have sensors located on the 4.4 m-long booms.
“We measure magnetic fields thousands of times smaller than those we are familiar with on Earth,” says Tim Horbury of Imperial College London, Principal Investigator for the Magnetometer instrument (MAG).“The data we received shows how the magnetic field decreases from the vicinity of the spacecraft to where the instruments are actually deployed. This is an independent confirmation that the boom actually deployed and that the instruments will, indeed, provide accurate scientific measurements in the future,” adds Tim.
Due to the recent escalation in COVID19 pandemic, ESA has been decided to scale down science mission operations. Unfortunately, The Solar Orbiter mission falls under the list of four Solar System science missions that require temporarily stopping instrument operation and data gathering. On the bright side, these missions have stable orbits and long mission durations, so turning off their science instruments and placing them into a largely unattended safe configuration for a certain period will have a negligible impact on their overall mission performance.
Let’s hope this pandemic situation will end soon and everything will fall back to the right places. We shall wait.
Stay safe❤
Hope for the best.
– Saifudheen
Credits – ESA, NASA
Author
