The European Solar Orbiter probe has obtained it about 75 million kilometers from the star
Solar Orbiter, the ambitious mission to the Sun launched in 2020 by the European Space Agency (ESA), has managed to capture the highest resolution image to date of the entire disk of our star and its outer atmosphere, the corona.
The snapshot, a mosaic of 35 individual images, was obtained on March 7 with the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument, when the probe was 75 million kilometers from the Sun, half the average distance that separates us.
Taken at a wavelength of 17 nanometers, in the extreme ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum, this image reveals the Sun’s upper atmosphere, the corona, which has a temperature of about a million degrees Celsius.
In total, the final image contains more than 83 million pixels on a 9148 x 9112-pixel grid, making it the highest resolution ever taken of the entire disk of the Sun and its corona.
The poles of the sun
There will be even better images. Solar Orbiter is still on the road. When it reaches its destination, it will be ‘only’ 42 million km from the Sun, 28% of the distance that separates the star from our planet. Later, and throughout its four-year mission, which can be extended to eight, the spacecraft will be the first to observe the Sun’s poles, never seen until now by man.
In addition to a battery of cameras and telescopes, Solar Orbiter carries various experiments and sensors onboard to measure the magnetic field, intensity, and flow of solar particles. No other solar mission has so far succeeded in combining optical instruments with measurement sensors.
The main objective will be to understand how the Sun’s environment and solar activity work, which follows eleven-year cycles without us knowing why. The ship will gradually correct its orbit, leaving the ecliptic (the plane of rotation of the planets around the Sun), until it is 33 degrees above it and allowing the solar poles to be seen for the first time.
