A new spacecraft built jointly by U.S. and European space agencies is ready for ...
WASHINGTON - A new spacecraft built jointly by U.S. and European space agencies is ready for a blazing journey to the sun to capture an unprecedented view of its two poles, an angle that could help researchers understand how the star’s vast bubble of magnetic energy affects Earth.
The Solar Orbiter spacecraft will lift off from a Florida launch pad on Sunday at 11:03 p.m. and autonomously unfold an array of solar panels and antennas before carrying on toward the sun for a 10-year mission mapping its polar regions. “Where did that plasma, the solar wind come from? At any one point, the majority of it during our solar cycle comes from the polar regions we’ve never imaged,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, the head of NASA’s science directorate.
Using a gravity assist from Earth and Venus, the orbiter will sling itself closer to the sun and eventually sync with its rotation - once every 25 days - when the probe reaches its closest point, and open up a cluster of tiny windows on the heat shield to capture and surveil how the surface of the sun changes over time.
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