• The Solar Orbiter spacecraft has obtained the first images ever taken of the Sun’s two poles.

• The European Space Agency (ESA) released images taken in March using three of Solar Orbiter’s onboard instruments. 

• The ESA-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft is the first to image the Sun’s poles from outside the ecliptic plane. 

• Solar Orbiter’s unique viewing angle will change our understanding of the Sun’s magnetic field, the solar cycle and the workings of space weather.

Solar Orbiter mission

• Solar Orbiter, developed by ESA in collaboration with NASA, was launched in February 2020 from Florida.

• Its mission is to perform unprecedented close-up observations of the Sun and from high-latitudes, providing the first images of the uncharted polar regions of the Sun, and investigating the Sun-Earth connection.

• Remote sensing payloads will perform high-resolution imaging of the Sun’s atmosphere — the corona — as well as the solar disc. Other instruments will measure the solar wind and the solar magnetic fields in the vicinity of the orbiter. 

• This will provide unprecedented insight into how our parent star works in terms of the 11-year solar cycle, and how we can better predict periods of stormy space weather.

• Solar Orbiter will address big questions in space science to help us understand how our star creates and controls the giant bubble of plasma – the heliosphere – that surrounds the whole solar system and influences the planets within it.

• The spacecraft has been developed by Airbus. Numerous industrial partners and scientific institutes across ESA Member States and the US have contributed to the construction of the spacecraft and the scientific instruments.

How were the images captured?

• The images were taken by three of Solar Orbiter’s scientific instruments: the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI), the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), and the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument. 

• Each instrument observes the Sun in a different way. 

• PHI images the Sun in visible light and maps the Sun’s surface magnetic field. 

• EUI images the Sun in ultraviolet light, revealing the million-degree charged gas in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona. 

• The SPICE instrument captures light coming from different temperatures of charged gas above the Sun’s surface, thereby revealing different layers of the Sun’s atmosphere.  

• By comparing and analysing the complementary observations made by these three imaging instruments, we can learn about how material moves in the Sun’s outer layers. 

• This may reveal unexpected patterns, such as polar vortices (swirling gas) similar to those seen around the poles of Venus and Saturn.

• These new observations are also key to understanding the Sun’s magnetic field and why it flips roughly every 11 years, coinciding with a peak in solar activity.

(The author is a trainer for Civil Services aspirants.)