Solar Orbiter

The Solar Orbiter is a collaboration between two world-leading space agencies, NASA and ESA, to investigate the most powerful source of force in our solar system – the Sun.

Mission Objective

Observation of the Sun’s polar regions and the heliosphere, focusing on the solar wind, solar storms, and magnetic field fluctuations.

 Mission Significance

The mission’s close-up views of the Sun’s poles are extraordinary since they have been challenging to observe. Therefore, the Solar Orbiter is the first mission to achieve it. Studying those regions is critical for understanding the Sun’s magnetic field and its impact on the solar cycle. This understanding is crucial for predicting space weather incidents, which can affect satellite operations, communications, and power distribution systems on Earth.

Source: ESA

Engineering Challenges

A spacecraft that needs to operate close to the sun must withstand a much more extreme and unusual space environment. Therefore, it imposes a lot of advanced engineering challenges, such as:

• Material endurance – The combined effects of contamination, extreme temperature, and radiation put the materials at high risk of deterioration. An accurate choice of materials for the spacecraft is crucial for its operation.
• Solar Irradiance Resilience – The spacecraft must withstand sunlight 13 times stronger than a typical LEO satellite.
• Stray light phenomena – High temperatures and solar flux increase the likelihood of unwanted reflections, which can ultimately lead to data interference.
• Momentum Loss – to reach the Sun, the spacecraft needs to lose a very large amount of its angular momentum, which requires enormous fuel mass.

Acktar’s Solution

The Solar Orbiter has 10 scientific instruments that observe the Sun in various wavelengths and measure particles, fields, and waves in the surrounding space. The instruments are categorized into in-situ instruments and remote sensing instruments. While the in-situ instruments measure the surrounding environment of the spacecraft directly, remote sensing observes the phenomena from a distance.

Acktar’s coated 2 of the instruments – METIS and SPICE – which allows the minimization of stray light, and by that simplifying the precision and quality of the data:

Coronagraph (METIS) – The coronagraph provides simultaneous images of the solar corona in visible and UV light. This data is crucial to studying the corona’s dynamics and structure, especially concerning space weather phenomena.

Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) – Observes the extreme UV radiation from the Sun’s corona. This data enables the study of plasma properties and how these are linked to solar wind sources.

Source: ESA

Main Research Objectives

The mission has various objectives, all under the same umbrella of the Sun study, particularly the creation and control of the heliosphere. This main topic creates four sub-topics, which are all related to each other and hopefully will be answered with the help of the Solar Orbiter:

• The origin of the magnetic field and the solar wind
• The production of energetic particle radiation by solar eruptions.
• The connection between the sun and its heliosphere and how it is derived from the solar dynamo.
• How are the changes in the properties of the heliosphere affected by solar disturbances in the Sun’s atmosphere?

Impact

What has it discovered until now?

• A better understanding of the solar wind dynamics and its interaction with magnetic fields in space by imagery from the Solar Orbiter, which described how the particles get a magnetic push from the sun’s outer corona.
• Campfires – small solar eruptions – were captured by the mission. Those were valuable images since the campfires might have contributed to the heating of the corona.

The change of the sun between Feb 21 and October 23. Source: ESA

The Solar Orbiter mission is part of a series of missions that open a new area of solar research. It has already made significant contributions to this field, and due to its closer proximity to the sun in the future, it will keep revealing even greater mysteries of solar activity and its effects on the sun.

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