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These Videos From a Space Probe Flying Past The Sun Are Truly Out of This World - ScienceAlert

These Videos From a Space Probe Flying Past The Sun Are Truly Out of This World - ScienceAlert

These Videos From a Space Probe Flying Past The Sun Are Truly Out of This World - ScienceAlert
May 19, 2022 1 min, 0 secs

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Solar Orbiter entered the close encounter, known as perihelion, on 26 March, coming in at a distance of around 48 million kilometers (30 million miles), inside the orbit of Mercury.

These new observations, taken with Solar Orbiter's 10 scientific instruments working together for the first time, should provide a wealth of data for teasing out the behavior of the Sun, including its wild magnetic fields, and the sometimes chaotic weather it blasts out into interplanetary space.

"The images are really breathtaking," says solar physicist David Berghmans of the Royal Observatory of Belgium.

The closer Solar Orbiter approaches the Sun, the better it will be able to sample how the solar wind blows.

Other instruments picked up solar events that could have produced the particles, accelerating them out into space, including a solar flare and coronal mass ejection, not dissimilar to a CME observed by the spacecraft on 10 March, seen below.

The Sun is currently quite active, which means the spacecraft is going to be beaming home absolute bucketloads of valuable data on solar activity

"We are so thrilled with the quality of the data from our first perihelion," says solar physicist Daniel Müller, ESA Project Scientist for Solar Orbiter

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