The wait is finally over . On thursday , July 16th ,the scientists from NASA and ESA have released the closest pictures ever taken of the Sun . These pictures are taken just 77 million km away from the surface of the sun . We have Solar Orbiter Spacecraft to thank for this marvelous achievement . Solar Orbiter is a collaboration product of NASA and ESA . It conducted a close pass of the sun in mid-June.
Holly Gilbert, NASA project scientist for the mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,says “These unprecedented pictures of the Sun are the closest we have ever obtained . These amazing images will help scientists piece together the Sun’s atmospheric layers, which is important for understanding how it drives space weather near the Earth and throughout the solar system.”
Even though these images includes the closest pictures ever,they are not the highest resolution ever captured. Solar Orbiter can’t beat the largest solar telescopes on Earth on capturing the highest resolution images . But this spacecraft has greater duties to perform . Mark McCaughrean , Esa’s senior advisor for science & exploration, says:”Solar Orbiter isn’t going closer to the Sun just to get higher-resolution images: it’s going closer to get into a different, less turbulent part of the solar wind, studying the particles and magnetic field in situ at that closer distance, while simultaneously taking remote data on the surface of the Sun and immediately around it for context. No other mission or telescope can do that.”.
Credits: Solar Orbiter/EUI Team (ESA & NASA); CSL, IAS, MPS, PMOD/WRC, ROB, UCL/MSSL
Campfires : The new solar feature
There are six imaging instruments present on this spacecraft . Each of them studies a different aspect of the Sun . An image taken by the instrument Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) reveals a new solar feature called “campfires” . Campfires are the small solar flares that are visible near the surface of the sun. The scientists are not yet clear about what exactly the campfires are or how they correspond to solar brightenings observed by other spacecraft. But they believe they could be “nanoflares,” or tiny sparks that help heat the sun’s outer atmosphere.
Principal investigator David Berghmans says “The campfires we are talking about here are the little nephews of solar flares, at least a million, perhaps a billion times smaller . When looking at the new high resolution EUI images, they are literally everywhere we look.”
Fortunately, the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument present on Solar Orbiter can offer a more precise measurement of the campfires’ temperature in order to understand it better.
“So we’re eagerly awaiting our next data set”.said Frédéric Auchère, principal investigator for SPICE operations at the Institute for Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France. “The hope is to detect nanoflares for sure and to quantify their role in coronal heating.”
Click here to read more about the future events of the Solar Orbiter Spacecraft.
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