“However, the spacecraft will be hiding behind a sunshield,” explained Walters. The Solar Orbiter, however, will get closer to the Sun than Mercury and therefore face even harsher conditions including extreme heat and cold. The team could partly reuse some of the technologies developed for ESA’s Bepi Colombo mission, which is currently on its way to Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun. The heat shield is shown on the left of the probe pointing upwards © ESA – S CorvajaĮnsuring that the spacecraft and its instruments survive in this extreme environment for at least seven years was the main challenge faced by the engineers. It is seen here being packaged up to be flown to NASA in Florida. In October 2019, the Solar Orbiter had undergone a year’s worth of tests near Munich. The Solar Orbiter will need to withstand these highly- charged electron and proton particles as well as temperatures up to 600☌ and sunlight 13 times brighter than the levels experienced on Earth.
Geomagnetic storms caused by solar wind frequently disrupt the signals of navigation satellites, such as GPS, and could even knock out power grids on the ground and affect telecommunication networks. Analysis of the star’s polar regions will enable a better understanding of the Sun’s magnetic field, which drives the powerful ejections of solar plasma that generate solar wind. This will enable the spacecraft’s telescopes to see some of the never before imaged regions of the Sun, With the exception of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which carries a simpler set of instruments and doesn’t have any telescopes to look directly at the Sun’s surface, no satellite before has been so close. At its closest, it will observe the Sun from a distance of about 42 million kilometres, about a quarter of the distance between the Sun and Earth. The Solar Orbiter will travel around the star in an elliptical orbit. Launched from NASA’s Cape Canaveral base, the probe will swing twice past Venus and once past Earth, using their gravities so that it can approach the Sun in 2022 at the right angle to best view its poles. The craft left the UK for Germany in September 2018 to undergo an extensive testing campaign at the IABG facility near Munich before it was shipped to the US in October 2019. Here we have 10 main instrument packages, each containing many sub-instruments more than 30 instruments altogether, and many of them have conflicting requirements.”Īirbus designed and built the 15-cubic metre probe for ESA at its UK facilities in Stevenage. “We have built many scientific satellites for the European Space Agency (ESA) in the past but most of them only had one instrument.
“The Solar Orbiter is one of the most complicated spacecraft we have ever built,” said Ian Walters during a telephone call from Florida, where he and his team spent months ahead of the craft’s successful NASA launch on 10 February 2020. Tereza Pultarova spoke to Ian Walters, Solar Orbiter Project Manager at Airbus Defence and Space, about the space probe.
The UK has invested €200 million in the €1.3 billion project and helped develop four of the instruments onboard.
An artist’s impression of the Solar Orbiter facing the Sun © AirbusĪ new European spacecraft, the Solar Orbiter, is set to improve our understanding of the Sun, including what gives rise to solar wind, a phenomenon that can affect technologies such as communications satellites and electric grids.
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