6 ms·

Solar Orbiter first images revealed

192 points by mauliknshah 6y ago

mirimir 6y ago
Those are some amazingly beautiful images. And for some reason, I'm reminded of the comet-core ship that surfs just above the Sun's convection tops in The Killing Star, by Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski. Also the ~analogous ships mentioned in Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime, and in Hannu Rajaniemi's "Flower Prince" trilogy.
chrisco255 6y ago
Many years ago I experienced a VR tour of the solar system on Oculus. I never fully comprehended just how big the sun was until going on that tour. Something about being able to float around in space, and see the planets stacked next to the sun going off into the horizon and looking up and down and all around at the sun, just a really cool VR exclusive experience. Fascinated to hear what they learn from this orbiter. We're currently in the deepest solar minimum of the space age, so I wonder if they'll discover anything related to the mechanisms that drive them.
- dylan604 6y ago
  I "hacked" NASA (I used wget/curl to download the publicly available images) to get the specific shots (wavelength/resolution) from SOHO to get an entire 11 day's worth of a single rotation of the sun. We put that sequence into a VR setting. It was strictly for a demo/PoC of an idea we were knocking around. The idea didn't gain any traction with the producers, so it just got shelved. It was fun showing everyone how simple parsing a structured text file, passing that data to another app for downloading, renaming/sorting to proper image sequence format. Start it, (stop/start 2 or 3 times to fix typo bugs), walk away for the weekend to come back on monday to see stuff ready to go. Many thanks to anyone at NASA/ESA/JAXA/anyone else that makes all of that data available!!
  - zapdrive 6y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
  - enriquto 6y ago
    The data is public and this usage seems to be intended, not sure why you call it "hacking".
    - Valgrim 6y ago
      Hacking has two meaning: one is to commit a computer crime, the other is to use technical knowledge to overcome a problem. This website name refers to the latter.
    - dylan604 6y ago
      I quoted the word hack deliberately. There have been well known cases of people being brought up on charges for using elite hacking software known as curl and/or wget. Also, it's what my co-workers called it. These are non-coder types, and can operate a computer just well enough to use the software they are trained to use. I use the Homebrew color scheme in Terminal, so green text on black background. Only hackers use Terminal anyway, so 1 + 1 = ? (you better have said 10)
- moritonal 6y ago
  I think you're talking about Titans of Space[1]. Closest thing to a Total Perspective Vortex I'd ever experienced[2]. 1. http://www.titansofspacevr.com/titansofspace.html http://www.titansofspacevr.com/titansofspace.html 2. https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex
sdenton4 6y ago
This is another reminder of just how little space exploration has happened so far... I'm kinda amazed no one's ever just thrown a probe at the sun to get as much data as possible before it burns. I get a similar feeling staring at the bare handful of images from the surface of Venus.
- Ankaios 6y ago
  Flying close to the Sun is hard, both because of the thermal environment and the difficulty of achieving trajectories that get close. A mission that launched two years ago, Parker Solar Probe, is actually going to get closer. Parker and Solar Orbiter have different objectives and should complement each other well. http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/ http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/
  - lattalayta 6y ago
    Ya, at first glance it seems easier to get to the sun, but due to orbital mechanics it's actually harder than it seems. Probes bound for deep-space destinations like Mars can piggyback off Earth’s momentum to fly faster. For a spacecraft to launch toward the sun, on the other hand, it must accelerate to nearly match the Earth’s velocity—in the opposite direction. With the planet’s motion essentially canceled out, the spacecraft can surrender to the sun’s gravity and begin to fall toward it. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/parker-solar-probe-launch-nasa/567197/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/parker-s...
    - lmm 6y ago
      Notably it requires more delta-V - i.e. more fuel - to reach the Sun than it does to leave the Solar system entirely.
    - MarkMc 6y ago
      Hmm so a probe can't sling-shot around another planet to do a U-turn?
      - deleted 6y ago
dylan604 6y ago
Kind of surprised this orbiter was not called Icarus
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Nominative determinism and all that...
- marsRoverDev 6y ago
  That name was floating around internally on the engineering teams until we'd ironed out the kinks.
jcun4128 6y ago
Haha these cookie popups, I don't know why I'm hesitant to take action on them. So like this site on mobile I'll read the article through half my phone screen.
- moritonal 6y ago
  Fun fact, the video changes from a direct video element to a YouTube element if you accept the cookie banner.
  - gorgoiler 6y ago
    ...which is then promptly blocked by my browser. The video is only playable if I _don’t_ click the cookie nag.
    - pteraspidomorph 6y ago
      This does not happen on my end. I wonder why? I'm in Europe and using Firefox with tracking protection, Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin (and no cookie popup killers of any kind). No sign of youtube, and the native element functions properly. EDIT: Tried also on Chrome. Accepted only essential cookies. No youtube. (Chrome also has uBlock Origin installed, though I don't know how effective that currently is.)
  - jcun4128 6y ago
    That's interesting, just yesterday I considered the idea of the cost(host) to have to download an entire video up front eg. video tag vs. streaming(YouTube) I wonder if that is the rationale.
mcbits 6y ago
I love watching video of activity on the solar surface because my brain has no intuition for the immense gravity and plasma dynamics at play. It's almost like getting a glimpse of a world with different laws of physics.
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  If I were to visit the sun I’d probably orbit it close up, rather than landing on the surface. Seems like the sensible thing to do. Being in orbit, I would sense weightlessness while being in the presences of an enormous gravitational field. Just as in orbit around earth: gravity is still there, you just can’t feel it. Would I notice anything different when weightlessly orbiting something 300,000x more massive than earth?
  - imglorp 6y ago
    > Would I notice anything different when weightlessly orbiting something 300,000x more massive than earth? Yes, due to tidal forces being stronger at one end of you than the other. You could use the formula given below but it looks like about a quarter of a newton. One other thing: not sure you could "land on the surface" because it's all plasma. Flying through it might be interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification
  - mcbits 6y ago
    I would think orbiting near the sun still just feels like free fall (as far as gravity is concerned), but close to an extremely dense object like a black hole might have enough of a gradient to feel the "spaghettification" effect or even be ripped apart by it. Yep, that's a word! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification
- koheripbal 6y ago
  The surface gravity of the Sun is only about 27x that of Earth (due to its lower density). More, sure, but not so much that you should consider it different physics. ...of course the temperature and hydrogen composition make it pretty different :)
memorysafety 6y ago
What is this thing here? https://i.imgur.com/hxiwfe6.png https://i.imgur.com/hxiwfe6.png (around 25%-25% from top left) Looks distinctly not part of the corona, more like a pod of some sorts, and it also jitters around in the video. I'm puzzled!
- JohannesH 6y ago
  Maybe damage to the instruments?
  - Certified 6y ago
    It is definitely a spacecraft side instrumentation artifact. Notice how all three of these jiggle the same? https://imgur.com/a/T7jduVG https://imgur.com/a/T7jduVG
    - danbr 6y ago
      ‘"But in fact, it's a sensor defect," he said. "In future processing when we further optimize this, this will be cleaned up and interpolated from nearby pixels. But for the moment, it's still clearly visible."’ https://www.livescience.com/sun-tardigrade-solar-orbiter-images.html https://www.livescience.com/sun-tardigrade-solar-orbiter-ima...
knorker 6y ago
"Published", not "revealed". I'm sorry. This just annoys me so much. There's two perfectly good words that pretty much always should be used instead of "revealed": "Published", or "Announced".

192 points by mauliknshah 6y ago

Those are some amazingly beautiful images. And for some reason, I'm reminded of the comet-core ship that surfs just above the Sun's convection tops in The Killing Star, by Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski. Also the ~analogous ships mentioned in Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime, and in Hannu Rajaniemi's "Flower Prince" trilogy.

chrisco255 6y ago

Many years ago I experienced a VR tour of the solar system on Oculus. I never fully comprehended just how big the sun was until going on that tour. Something about being able to float around in space, and see the planets stacked next to the sun going off into the horizon and looking up and down and all around at the sun, just a really cool VR exclusive experience. Fascinated to hear what they learn from this orbiter. We're currently in the deepest solar minimum of the space age, so I wonder if they'll discover anything related to the mechanisms that drive them.

dylan604 6y ago
I "hacked" NASA (I used wget/curl to download the publicly available images) to get the specific shots (wavelength/resolution) from SOHO to get an entire 11 day's worth of a single rotation of the sun. We put that sequence into a VR setting. It was strictly for a demo/PoC of an idea we were knocking around. The idea didn't gain any traction with the producers, so it just got shelved. It was fun showing everyone how simple parsing a structured text file, passing that data to another app for downloading, renaming/sorting to proper image sequence format. Start it, (stop/start 2 or 3 times to fix typo bugs), walk away for the weekend to come back on monday to see stuff ready to go. Many thanks to anyone at NASA/ESA/JAXA/anyone else that makes all of that data available!!
- zapdrive 6y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
- enriquto 6y ago
  The data is public and this usage seems to be intended, not sure why you call it "hacking".
  - Valgrim 6y ago
    Hacking has two meaning: one is to commit a computer crime, the other is to use technical knowledge to overcome a problem. This website name refers to the latter.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    I quoted the word hack deliberately. There have been well known cases of people being brought up on charges for using elite hacking software known as curl and/or wget. Also, it's what my co-workers called it. These are non-coder types, and can operate a computer just well enough to use the software they are trained to use. I use the Homebrew color scheme in Terminal, so green text on black background. Only hackers use Terminal anyway, so 1 + 1 = ? (you better have said 10)
moritonal 6y ago
I think you're talking about Titans of Space[1]. Closest thing to a Total Perspective Vortex I'd ever experienced[2]. 1. http://www.titansofspacevr.com/titansofspace.html http://www.titansofspacevr.com/titansofspace.html 2. https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex

sdenton4 6y ago

This is another reminder of just how little space exploration has happened so far... I'm kinda amazed no one's ever just thrown a probe at the sun to get as much data as possible before it burns. I get a similar feeling staring at the bare handful of images from the surface of Venus.

Ankaios 6y ago
Flying close to the Sun is hard, both because of the thermal environment and the difficulty of achieving trajectories that get close. A mission that launched two years ago, Parker Solar Probe, is actually going to get closer. Parker and Solar Orbiter have different objectives and should complement each other well. http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/ http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/
- lattalayta 6y ago
  Ya, at first glance it seems easier to get to the sun, but due to orbital mechanics it's actually harder than it seems. Probes bound for deep-space destinations like Mars can piggyback off Earth’s momentum to fly faster. For a spacecraft to launch toward the sun, on the other hand, it must accelerate to nearly match the Earth’s velocity—in the opposite direction. With the planet’s motion essentially canceled out, the spacecraft can surrender to the sun’s gravity and begin to fall toward it. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/parker-solar-probe-launch-nasa/567197/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/parker-s...
  - lmm 6y ago
    Notably it requires more delta-V - i.e. more fuel - to reach the Sun than it does to leave the Solar system entirely.
  - MarkMc 6y ago
    Hmm so a probe can't sling-shot around another planet to do a U-turn?
    - deleted 6y ago

dylan604 6y ago

Kind of surprised this orbiter was not called Icarus

mhh__ 6y ago
Nominative determinism and all that...
marsRoverDev 6y ago
That name was floating around internally on the engineering teams until we'd ironed out the kinks.

jcun4128 6y ago

Haha these cookie popups, I don't know why I'm hesitant to take action on them. So like this site on mobile I'll read the article through half my phone screen.

moritonal 6y ago
Fun fact, the video changes from a direct video element to a YouTube element if you accept the cookie banner.
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  ...which is then promptly blocked by my browser. The video is only playable if I _don’t_ click the cookie nag.
  - pteraspidomorph 6y ago
    This does not happen on my end. I wonder why? I'm in Europe and using Firefox with tracking protection, Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin (and no cookie popup killers of any kind). No sign of youtube, and the native element functions properly. EDIT: Tried also on Chrome. Accepted only essential cookies. No youtube. (Chrome also has uBlock Origin installed, though I don't know how effective that currently is.)
- jcun4128 6y ago
  That's interesting, just yesterday I considered the idea of the cost(host) to have to download an entire video up front eg. video tag vs. streaming(YouTube) I wonder if that is the rationale.

mcbits 6y ago

I love watching video of activity on the solar surface because my brain has no intuition for the immense gravity and plasma dynamics at play. It's almost like getting a glimpse of a world with different laws of physics.

gorgoiler 6y ago
If I were to visit the sun I’d probably orbit it close up, rather than landing on the surface. Seems like the sensible thing to do. Being in orbit, I would sense weightlessness while being in the presences of an enormous gravitational field. Just as in orbit around earth: gravity is still there, you just can’t feel it. Would I notice anything different when weightlessly orbiting something 300,000x more massive than earth?
- imglorp 6y ago
  > Would I notice anything different when weightlessly orbiting something 300,000x more massive than earth? Yes, due to tidal forces being stronger at one end of you than the other. You could use the formula given below but it looks like about a quarter of a newton. One other thing: not sure you could "land on the surface" because it's all plasma. Flying through it might be interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification
- mcbits 6y ago
  I would think orbiting near the sun still just feels like free fall (as far as gravity is concerned), but close to an extremely dense object like a black hole might have enough of a gradient to feel the "spaghettification" effect or even be ripped apart by it. Yep, that's a word! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification
koheripbal 6y ago
The surface gravity of the Sun is only about 27x that of Earth (due to its lower density). More, sure, but not so much that you should consider it different physics. ...of course the temperature and hydrogen composition make it pretty different :)

memorysafety 6y ago

What is this thing here? https://i.imgur.com/hxiwfe6.png https://i.imgur.com/hxiwfe6.png (around 25%-25% from top left) Looks distinctly not part of the corona, more like a pod of some sorts, and it also jitters around in the video. I'm puzzled!

JohannesH 6y ago
Maybe damage to the instruments?
- Certified 6y ago
  It is definitely a spacecraft side instrumentation artifact. Notice how all three of these jiggle the same? https://imgur.com/a/T7jduVG https://imgur.com/a/T7jduVG
  - danbr 6y ago
    ‘"But in fact, it's a sensor defect," he said. "In future processing when we further optimize this, this will be cleaned up and interpolated from nearby pixels. But for the moment, it's still clearly visible."’ https://www.livescience.com/sun-tardigrade-solar-orbiter-images.html https://www.livescience.com/sun-tardigrade-solar-orbiter-ima...

knorker 6y ago

"Published", not "revealed". I'm sorry. This just annoys me so much. There's two perfectly good words that pretty much always should be used instead of "revealed": "Published", or "Announced".