ESA Releases Solar Orbiter’s First Science Data

ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft, in collaboration with NASA, launched in February 2020 on its mission to study to Sun and it began collecting science data in June.

Now, three of its ten instruments — the Energetic Particle Detector (EPD), the Radio and Plasma Waves (RPW) instrument, and the Magnetometer (MAG) — have released their first science data, revealing the state of our star in a ‘quiet’ phase.

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Imager credit: ESA / ATG Medialab.

ESA’s Solar Orbiter reached its first perihelion, the point in its orbit closest to the star, on June 15, 2020, getting as close as 77 million km (47.8 million miles) to the star’s surface.

Source / Image Courtesy

Closer than ever: Solar Orbiter’s first views of the Sun

The first images from ESA’s Solar Orbiter are already exceeding expectations and revealing interesting new phenomena on the Sun.