ESA - Solar Orbiter updates

[jacqmans]

Solar Orbiter’s widest high-res view of the Sun
24/04/2025

Five years into its mission, Solar Orbiter stuns again with this detailed view of the Sun. What you see is the Sun’s million-degree hot atmosphere, called the corona, as it looks in ultraviolet light. 

Dive in and explore the hot plasma (charged particles) caught in the Sun’s messy magnetic field. Can you spot the glowing coronal loops around active regions, and the darker, cooler filaments and prominences? 

Obtaining such a detailed image is no easy feat. On 9 March 2025, at around 77 million km from the Sun, the Solar Orbiter spacecraft was oriented to point to different regions across the Sun in a 5 x 5 grid. At each pointing direction, the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument captured six images at high resolution and two wide-angle views.

The image you see here combines a whopping 200 individual images into the widest high-resolution view of the Sun yet. (See previous full Sun views here.)

Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA. The Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument is led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB).

[Image description: The Sun looks like a warm yellow sphere with a surface covered with glowing messy hair. The yellow glow extends to the edges of the image, with some regions brighter than others. Many bright yellow arcs stick out from a wide band around the Sun’s equator. A darker region stands out across a roughly horizontal line near the Sun’s south pole. The bright arcs and some darker material can also be seen around the Sun’s edges.]

[Technical details: This large image was assembled from images taken between 13:06 and 17:31 UTC (14:06–18:31 CET) on 9 March 2025 by Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager at a wavelength of 17.4 nanometres. Solar Orbiter was viewing the Sun from a latitude 11.4° below the equator at a distance of around 77 million km. The final image is 12544 x 12544 pixels in size, corresponding 6171.6 x 6171.6 arc seconds or 2325.5 x 2325.5 million km. The Sun, which has a diameter of 1.4 million km, spans around 7505 pixels and 3692.6 arc seconds.]

[jacqmans]

Solar Orbiter gets world-first views of the Sun’s poles
11/06/2025

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.

Any image you have ever seen of the Sun was taken from around the Sun’s equator. This is because Earth, the other planets, and all other operational spacecraft orbit the Sun within a flat disc around the Sun called the ecliptic plane. By tilting its orbit out of this plane, Solar Orbiter reveals the Sun from a whole new angle. 

The video above compares Solar Orbiter’s view (in yellow) with the one from Earth (grey), on 23 March 2025. At the time, Solar Orbiter was viewing the Sun from an angle of 17° below the solar equator, enough to directly see the Sun’s south pole. Over the coming years, the spacecraft will tilt its orbit even further, so the best views are yet to come.

“Today we reveal humankind’s first-ever views of the Sun’s pole,” says Prof. Carole Mundell, ESA's Director of Science. “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. These new unique views from our Solar Orbiter mission are the beginning of a new era of solar science.”


All eyes on the Sun’s south pole

The collage above shows the Sun’s south pole as recorded on 16–17 March 2025, when Solar Orbiter was viewing the Sun from an angle of 15° below the solar equator. This was the mission’s first high-angle observation campaign, a few days before reaching its current maximum viewing angle of 17°. 

The images shown above were taken by three of Solar Orbiter’s scientific instruments: the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI), the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), and the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument. Click on the image to zoom in and see video versions of the data. 

“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.

The instruments each observe the Sun in a different way. PHI images the Sun in visible light (top left) and maps the Sun’s surface magnetic field (top centre). EUI images the Sun in ultraviolet light (top right), revealing the million-degree charged gas in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona. The SPICE instrument (bottom row) captures light coming from different temperatures of charged gas above the Sun’s surface, thereby revealing different layers of the Sun's atmosphere. 

By comparing and analysing the complementary observations made by these three imaging instruments, we can learn about how material moves in the Sun’s outer layers. This may reveal unexpected patterns, such as polar vortices (swirling gas) similar to those seen around the poles of Venus and Saturn. 

These groundbreaking new observations are also key to understanding the Sun’s magnetic field and why it flips roughly every 11 years, coinciding with a peak in solar activity. Current models and predictions of the 11-year solar cycle fall short of being able to predict exactly when and how powerfully the Sun will reach its most active state. 

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_Orbiter/Solar_Orbiter_gets_world-first_views_of_the_Sun_s_poles#msdynmkt_trackingcontext=c2fe65e2-e468-41fb-8607-90275b9f0100

[D_Dom]

ESA - Ulysses overview

European Space Agency
https://www.esa.int › Science_Exploration › Space_Science
Ulysses was the first mission to study the environment of space above and below the poles of the Sun.

[Phil Stooke]

Yes, but it had no imaging system, so these are the first views of the poles.