The latest from Solar Orbiter

First release of Solar Orbiter Science Data

ESA has just released the first science data from Solar Orbiter. This release concerns data from the in-situ payload that entered its science phase on 15 June 2020, when the spacecraft was at its first perihelion at 0.51 astronomical units. Calibrated data from the instruments EPD (Energetic Particle Detector), MAG (Magnetometer) and RPW (Radio and Plasma Waves) are publicly available via the ESA Solar Orbiter Archive, while data from the SWA instrument (Solar Wind Analyser) will become public later this year. The remote-sensing payload will start its science phase in November 2021.

Publication of Solar Orbiter A&A special issue

Astronomy & Astrophysics special issue on the Solar Orbiter mission is now published. It features a series of 17 papers on the mission and its instruments.

Copyright: ESA/ATG medialab

Access to Solar Orbiter Low Latency Data

The Low Latency (LL) data from the four in-situ instruments (EPD, MAG, RPW, SWA) are now available via the ESA Solar Orbiter Archive . A detailed description of the LL data products can be found here.

LL data are a limited subset of each instrument's data, primarily operational products, used to perform high-level instrument health checks, to help choose the best targets for the high-resolution imagers, and, for some instruments, to help select the most interesting events to downlink at the best resolution. Consequently, they are low quality data not suitable for publication. These data will be immediately available to the whole community from now on and for the entire duration of the mission.

Copyright: ESA/ATG medialab

On June 15, Solar Orbiter has made its first close approach to the Sun. The commissioning phase is now over and Solar Orbiter is ready to commence its cruise phase, which will last until November 2021.

At the end of May and early June, Solar Orbiter will cross the ion and/or dust tails of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS). The ion tail crossing is most likely to occur on May 31-June 1, and the dust tail crossing on June 6.

Although the science mission will begin in mid-June, SWA will be exceptionally run in science mode during the weekends of week 22 and 23 giving a rare opportunity to perform the first predicted serendipitous comet observation ever.

Caption of the Figure: Relative paths and positions of spacecraft (orange), Comet ATLAS (blue) and its dust tail at the time on 2020 June 6 when Solar Orbiter will cross Comet ATLAS's orbital plane. The horizontal plane depicts the ecliptic plane, with the Sun shown as a red dot. Modeled dust tail particles are red to the north of the ecliptic, and blue to the south.

SWA commissioning successfully completed

Copyright: ESA/ATG medialab

SWA commissioning phase was successfully completed on May 11, 14:43 UTC. On June 14, Solar Orbiter will enter the Cruise Phase during which all the in-situ instruments (SWA, MAG, RPW and EPD) will be run in science mode and will start to produce the first scientific data.

Solar Orbiter is en route to its science operations orbit around the Sun

Solar Orbiter commissioning is in progress and the first results are very promising. Go Solar Orbiter!

Solar Orbiter successfully launched into space!

Solar Orbiter has been successfully launched into space during the early hours of 10 February 2020