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Solar Orbiter gets world-first views of the Sun's poles

Thanks to its newly tilted orbit around the Sun, the European Space Agency-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft is the first to image the Sun’s poles from outside the ecliptic plane. Solar Orbiter’s unique viewing angle will change our understanding of the Sun’s magnetic field, the solar cycle and the workings of space weather. 

“The Sun is our nearest star, giver of life and potential disruptor of modern space and ground power systems, so it is imperative that we understand how it works and learn to predict its behaviour. “We didn’t know what exactly to expect from these first observations – the Sun’s poles are literally terra incognita,” says Prof. Sami Solanki, who leads the PHI instrument team from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany. Below, you can directly compare the location and movement of particles (carbon ions) in a thin layer called the ' transition region ’, where the Sun's temperature rapidly increases from 10 000 °C to hundreds of thousands of degrees.

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