While NASA is going crazy over budget cuts, the European Space Agency (ESA) is focused on new images from the Solar Orbiter spacecraft showing the sun’s south pole from a distance of about 40 million miles (shown above).
Launched in February 2020, Solar Orbiter is an ESA-led cooperative mission with NASA designed to answer a number of questions:
- What drives the Sun’s 11-year cycle of rising and subsiding magnetic activity?
- What heats up the upper layer of its atmosphere, the corona, to millions of degrees Celsius?
- How does solar wind form, and what accelerates it to speeds of hundreds of kilometres per second?
- How does it all affect our planet?
Professor Carole Mundell, ESA’s Director of Science, stated:
Today we reveal humankind’s first-ever views of the Sun’s pole…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.
We all need a diversion from the ongoing budget news, so it is good to read about ongoing science and a successful mission.
Our Awesome Universe 