The collaborative European Space Agency (ESA) and Nasa project has already yielded new discoveries about the dynamic behaviour of our nearest star. Discovering how that cycle works is another of Solar Orbiter’s mission objectives and is key to a better understanding of solar physics. One of the mission’s objectives is to better understand what generates these massive solar storms, and how that ties in with our star’s 11-year cycle of rising and falling magnetic activity. Researchers hope that the knowledge gained from the Solar Orbiter mission will improve the models used to forecast the worst of the giant storms and space weather in general. A once-in-a-century event like the solar storm that hit Earth in 1859, known as the Carrington event, could be disastrous for today’s modern technology causing massive power outages affecting millions and lasting for days, wreak havoc with global telecommunication systems, disrupt radio signals, and damage electronics. When they hit the Earth’s magnetosphere they can be visualised as the beautiful aurora light shows around our polar regions.Įxtreme events pose a danger to our increasingly technologically dependent society, endangering orbiting satellites, astronauts on board the space station and air passengers flying over the poles. During periods of high solar activity these CMEs are more frequent. These huge storms on the Sun generate strong accelerated pulses in the solar wind that constantly streams out from it, bathing our whole solar system. It belches out huge energy flares, and – biggest of all – giant storms or coronal mass ejections (CMEs) over a variable 11-year solar cycle. Apart from furthering our understanding of how the Sun works, there are practical reasons why observing and better predicting the Sun’s behaviour is a good idea.įar from being a quiet, stable and benign star, our Sun is constantly changing. The suite of 10 on-board instruments will enable it to uniquely marry the study of events in the Sun’s gaseous corona, measure its magnetic fields, and sample the solar wind as it flows past the spacecraft as a stream of energetic particles. Launched in February 2020 from Cape Canaveral, a 1.7-tonne spacecraft called the Solar Orbiter aims to get up-close images of the Sun from 42 million kilometres away, while measuring its energetic behaviour in real-time.
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