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Solar Orbiter gets world-first views of the Sun's poles
- superkuh 1y agoThis slightly tilted view of the poles is a teaser. I didn't know they'd managed to incorporate late in the mission gravity assists into the cheaper plan B to slightly tweak out of the ecliptic while dropping close to the sun. That's pretty cool. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Animation_of_Parker_Solar_Probe_trajectory.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Animatio... But we could've had so much more. The original proposal A for the ESA Solar Orbiter was a highly inclined orbit relative to the ecliptic plane to truly get full polar views of the sun. But this was too expensive. So they went with the cheaper proposal B which was mostly just a spectroscopic platform. Similar to SDO AIA, except in a solar orbit (almost completely within the ecliptic plane) instead of SDO AIA's Earth based sun synchronous orbit.
- hcarvalhoalves 1y agoI suppose it takes a lot of deltaV to get a stable orbit over the sun poles?
- ChocolateGod 1y agoYou'd need to completely cancel out the rotation of the solar system, far beyond what we have the technology to do.
- perihelions 1y agoIt's doable with gravity assists. Ulysses got up to 79° inclination using a Jupiter flyby. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(spacecraft)
- sandworm101 1y agoIt does, but most of the needed dV is harvested from the planets during gravity assists. The probe is accelerated/turned several hundred or thousand m/s and in exchange the planets it passes are shifted/slowed/turned by maybe 0.00000000000000000000001 m/s. In this case, the probe largely needs to slow down, to bleed of the speed it got from being at earth's orbit, so the planets are probably being accelerated.
- BurningFrog 1y agoThey plan to get a more polar orbit each time they get close to Venus: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/01/Solar_Orbiter_journey_around_the_Sun https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/01/Solar_Orbi... Not sure if 33° angle in 2029 is the final "polarity" or if they'll keep tilting after that.
- NooneAtAll3 1y agoyou linked Parker probe, not Solar Orbiter
- jbjorge 1y ago"But in the end, it doesn't even matter"
- superkuh 1y agoHuh, yeah, I am not entirely sure how that happened. I think copy buffer hijinks. How embarassing. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Animation_of_Solar_Orbiter%27s_trajectory_-_equatorial_view.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Animatio...
- sandworm101 1y agoDambit. No hexagons. I think i might have lost an old bet.
- bravesoul2 1y agoFrom a simulation? NVidia had come a long way since you made the bet.
- sandworm101 1y agoNo. From the realwold cyclonic storms of Saturn and Jupiter that form unnatural-looking polygons at their poles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn%27s_hexagon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn%27s_hexagon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter%27s_South_Pole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter%27s_South_Pole
- bravesoul2 1y agoThat is fascinating. Next bet is if Saturn's hexagon will change into another n-agon in our lifetime. Obviously we'd need a probe to check.
- tickerticker 1y agoLOL
- svachalek 1y agoHa. I wonder what solar scientists were expecting here, how surprising would it have been if the sun did have polygonal storms like the gas giants?
- lostlogin 1y ago‘World First’ is a poor choice of words. ‘First Ever’?
- riffraff 1y agowell, they are the first time they're seen on this world so I think it's fine.
- throwaway81523 1y agoThere was a previous mission (Ulysses aka International Solar Polar mission) that sent back a lot of data but for whatever reason, they didn't have it send visual images. Big bright ball = no surprise, maybe.
- lionkor 1y agoIt's our world's first -- maybe the others already got it. Or better, "humanity's first".
- bravesoul2 1y agoHappened outside our world though!
- colordrops 1y agoI love this, seems so minor if not paying attention but it's absolutely mind blowing. Getting a view we never saw of the life giver, an object that used to be revered as a god, nearly every human alive I history has basked in it's light and heat, and the for the first time we are seeing it in full
- ahmedfromtunis 1y agoI didn't even realize that we've never seen the sun's poles before as I just assumed we already scanned our star many times over. A nice reminder of how patchy and limited our knowledge is despite the impression of the opposite. Keep up the great work, humans!
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- wtcactus 1y agoThis allegation is incorrect. The Ulysses spacecraft had already did that in 1994-1995. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(spacecraft) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(spacecraft)
- Ringz 1y agoThe article points out: „The only exception to this is the ESA/NASA Ulysses mission (1990–2009), which flew over the Sun's poles but did not carry any imaging instruments. Solar Orbiter's observations will complement Ulysses’ by observing the poles for the first time with telescopes, in addition to a full suite of in-situ sensors, while flying much closer to the Sun. Additionally, Solar Orbiter will monitor changes at the poles throughout the solar cycle.“
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