The newest photographs from the Solar Orbiter show the whole Sun in unparalleled clarity. It is stated that one of the photographs, produced by the EUI (Extreme Ultraviolet Imager), is now the best resolution photograph ever seen of the Sun’s whole disc and outermost environment.
[Credit: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI team; Data processing: E. Kraaikamp (ROB)]
Using the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) equipment, a second picture was captured at the Lyman-beta wavelength of UV irradiation, which is generated by hydrogen gas. This picture is the first entire Sun image captured in 50 years, and this is by far the greatest one ever captured. The photographs were collected while Solar Orbiter was around 75 million km away from our planet, almost midway between our planet and its mother sun.
During the passage, in parallel to the EUI device, the SPICE sensor was also capturing information. These, too, had to be stitched properly to form a mosaic of information. Aiming to follow the strata of the Sun’s atmosphere from the corona all the way through to a structure described as the chromosphere as it gets closer to the top layer, SPICE will be utilized. This will enable solar scientists to track the path of the tremendously intense outbursts that actually occur in the corona all the way down to the lowest atmospheric layers of the environment.
Meanwhile, the corona, which is located just above Sun, may approach temperatures of a million degrees Centigrade, although the surface temperature is only approximately 5000 degrees Celsius. It is another primary scientific goal of the Solar Orbiter, and it will be used to investigate it.
It is expected that the spaceship will travel this near to the Sun on a regular basis during the next several years. It will also progressively increase its tilt to let it monitor the Sun’s polar regions, which had been hitherto undetected. Solar Orbiter is a joint effort between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA.
