Solar Orbiter is now between the sun and the earth and will reach perihelion on the 26th

This mission’s Solar Orbiter’s closest approach to our star will occur on March 26.

Above: This is a video taken by Solar Orbiter during its final approach to the sun in early 2022.

Solar Orbiter is a joint mission of the European Space Agency and NASA. Currently, officially, it lies halfway between our planet and the Sun. According to information released by the European Space Agency, the spacecraft is currently 46.6 million miles away from our home star.

The Solar Orbiter will begin scientific observations in November 2021 and will continue to approach the sun. The spacecraft is measuring the solar wind and volatile corona.

The probe's location between the Earth and the Sun provides researchers with a unique opportunity to study space weather. Space weather is a feature of the solar wind, a steady stream of charged particles from the Sun that produces auroras and occasionally disrupts electronic equipment on Earth.

Solar Orbiter takes a path around the sun, but in doing so (counterintuitively) saves energy. The orbiter uses the gravity of Earth and Venus to catapult inward. In addition to providing excellent photo opportunities, these gravity-assisted maneuvers reduce the amount of fuel required to propel the spacecraft, saving valuable payload space.

Nearly 50 million miles doesn’t sound like a lot on the space odometer, but it’s still compared to the fact that the Webb Telescope only had to travel 1 million miles to reach its observing site in deep space. Thousands of miles away.

Above: Solar Orbiter at its closest approach to the Sun.

The orbiter is currently very close to the Earth and the Sun, allowing it to collect useful data on how the solar wind blows through the solar system. Combining observations from Solar Orbiter with data from spacecraft such as IRIS (in Earth orbit) and ESA's SOHO (nearly 1 million miles from Earth) will give a more complete picture of the winds, which act like an ocean of solar particles. Like buoys in spacecraft, dispersed spacecraft will provide dynamic observations of space weather.

Daniel Müller, ESA Solar Orbiter project scientist, said: "From now on, we will be 'entering unknown' territory in terms of Solar Orbiter's observations of the Sun."

The orbiter will make its closest approach to the sun on March 26, at a distance of 26 million miles. From March 14 to April 6, it will orbit Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. There, the orbiter will collect data on the sun's surface and what it blasts into space, but ESA researchers hope the spacecraft's proximity to the sun will provide some insights into the "solar campfires" it discovered in 2020. Unique data. Last year, scientists suggested that the Camp Fire might be a convergence of magnetic fields on the sun's surface, but the situation remains unresolved.

"What I'm most looking forward to is finding out what we're doing in the extreme ultraviolet Could all these dynamic features seen in the imager (Campfire of Creation) feed into the solar wind?"

Soon after the spacecraft reaches its closest approach to the sun later this month. , we will receive some of the closest images ever taken of the Sun.