9/6/2023 0 Comments Nasa solar orbiter images![]() ![]() What breathtaking pictures The European Solar Orbiter probe, launched in 2020. It will also gradually raise its orientation to view the Sun’s previously unobserved polar regions. Crdits : ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Team. It is also recording data on the solar wind of particles that flows outwards from the Sun.Īnd this is just the start, over the coming years the spacecraft will repeatedly fly this close to the Sun. The spacecraft is now inside the orbit of Mercury, the inner planet, taking the highest resolution images of the Sun it can take. On 26 March, Solar Orbiter reaches another mission milestone: its first close perihelion. This will make it easier to compare results from different instruments and observatories in future. The images were taken on 7 March, precisely when Solar Orbiter crossed the Sun-Earth line, so the images can be compared with Earth-bound solar instruments and cross-calibrated. Investigating this mystery is one of the key scientific objectives of Solar Orbiter. This image, above, is what the Solar Orbiter scientists are calling a solar hedgehog. ![]() But above the Sun, the corona reaches a million degrees Celsius whereas the surface is only about 5000☌. ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Team The ‘Solar Hedgehog’ mystery. Usually the temperature drops as you move away from a hot object. These ‘prominences’ are prone to erupt, throwing huge quantities of coronal gas into space and creating ‘space weather’ storms. This reveals the Sun’s upper atmosphere, the corona, which has a temperature of around a million degrees Celsius.Īt the 2 o’clock (near the image of the Earth for scale) and 8 o’clock positions on the edges of the Sun, dark filaments can be seen projecting away from the surface. For comparison, this image has a resolution that is ten times better than what a 4K TV screen can display.ĮUI images the Sun at a wavelength of 17 nanometers, in the extreme ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum. ![]() In total, the final image contains more than 83 million pixels in a 9148 x 9112 pixel grid. Taken one after the other, the full image was captured over a period of more than four hours because each tile takes about 10 minutes, including the time for the spacecraft to point from one segment to the next. ESAs Solar Orbiter, launched on 10 February 2020, performed its first close approach to the Sun in mid-June, capturing unique views of our nearest star. The high-resolution telescope of EUI takes pictures of such high spatial resolution that, at that close distance, a mosaic of 25 individual images is needed to cover the entire Sun. The images were taken when Solar Orbiter was at a distance of roughly 75 million kilometres, half way between our world and its parent star. ![]()
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