Other images from the spacecraft showcase additional promise for later in the mission, when Solar Orbiter is closer to the Sun. “The hope is to detect nanoflares for sure and to quantify their role in coronal heating.” “So we're eagerly awaiting our next data set,” said Frédéric Auchère, principal investigator for SPICE operations at the Institute for Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France. But it’s possible they are mini-explosions known as nanoflares – tiny but ubiquitous sparks theorized to help heat the Sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, to its temperature 300 times hotter than the solar surface. It’s not yet clear what these campfires are or how they correspond to solar brightenings observed by other spacecraft. “When looking at the new high resolution EUI images, they are literally everywhere we look.” “The campfires we are talking about here are the little nephews of solar flares, at least a million, perhaps a billion times smaller,” Berghmans said. Principal investigator David Berghmans, an astrophysicist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, points out what he calls “campfires” dotting the Sun in EUI’s images. The Sun is located on the right, outside the image frame. But the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager, or EUI, on Solar Orbiter returned data hinting at solar features never observed in such detail. Looking back towards home from about 155.7 million miles (250.6 million kilometers) away, the Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager, or SoloHI, aboard ESA and NASA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft captured Venus, Earth, and Mars together on Nov. Normally, the first images from a spacecraft confirm the instruments are working scientists don’t expect new discoveries from them. Solar Orbiter carries six imaging instruments, each of which studies a different aspect of the Sun. “These images show that Solar Orbiter is off to an excellent start.” “We didn’t expect such great results so early,” said Daniel Müller, ESA’s Solar Orbiter project scientist. “These amazing images will help scientists piece together the Sun’s atmospheric layers, which is important for understanding how it drives space weather near the Earth and throughout the solar system.” “These unprecedented pictures of the Sun are the closest we have ever obtained,” said Holly Gilbert, NASA project scientist for the mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. 9, 2020 (EST), the spacecraft completed its first close pass of the Sun in mid-June. Solar Orbiter is an international collaboration between the European Space Agency, or ESA, and NASA, to study our closest star, the Sun. Its next flyby of Venus is on September 3, 2022.The first images from ESA/NASA’s Solar Orbiter are now available to the public, including the closest pictures ever taken of the Sun. It’s in an orbital resonance with Venus, so is using the planet routinely to alter its trajectory. Scientists from ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA will present the first images captured by Solar Orbiter, the joint ESA/NASA mission to study the Sun, during an online news briefing at 8 a.m. It’s one of the major events in the mission. Solar Orbiter is now inside the orbit of Mercury, the closest it will get to the Sun at about 50 million kilometers. They include the first telescope observations from close to the Sun, the first images of the north and south poles of the Sun and the first full observation of the solar wind. Launched in early 2020, Solar Orbiter has a suite of 10 different scientific instruments that are making a lot of observations for the very first time. Purple is hydrogen gas at a temperature of 10 000☌, blue is carbon at 32 000☌, green is oxygen at 320 000☌ and yellow is neon at 630 000☌. They were taken by the spacecraft’s Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument at several different wavelengths of the extreme ultraviolet spectrum. ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/SPICE team Data processing: G. Solar Orbiter's images of the Sun using its Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE).
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