Successfully launched the solar probe

Solar Orbiter spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral air base in Florida at 11h03 on 10 February (Hanoi time), began the journey to reach the Sun.

The Solar Orbiter is the result of a joint partnership between the US Space Agency (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA), marking the first project to provide images of the North and South Pole of the Sun, using set of 6 equipment on board. Collecting imagery of this region is important because the data will help researchers better understand the star's strong magnetic field and its effect on the Earth.

The Solar Orbiter will take about two years to fly to the elliptical orbit around the Sun. Gravity from Earth and Venus will help the ship escape the elliptical plane parallel to the equator of the Sun, studying the star's polar region from above and below.

The motion of the Solar Orbiter is similar to that of the Ulysses spacecraft, another collaborative project between NASA and ESA launched in 1990 and also flying over the solar poles. Ulysses completed three missions around the Sun in 2009, but the ship's visibility was limited due to equatorial imaging.

"Before Solar Orbiter, all of the devices used to capture the Sun were in elliptical planes or very close by," says Russell Howard, a space scientist at the Naval Laboratory in Washington, DC, the researcher in charge. Development of one of 10 Solar Orbiter devices, said. "Now we can see the sun from above."

The Solar Orbiter is equipped with 10 devices that can record observations on the solar corona, the poles and the solar disk. The ship can also use a variety of devices to measure the magnetic field and solar wind, high-energy stream of particles shooting from the star across the system.

Understanding the magnetic field and solar wind is of great importance because they contribute to the creation of space weather and the impact on the Earth by disrupting systems such as satellite navigation (GPS), affecting communications. and even astronauts on the International Space Station. The Sun's magnetic field is so large that it extends across Pluto, paving the way for the solar wind to sweep straight through the system.

The Solar Orbiter will operate simultaneously with NASA's Parker orbiter orbiting the Sun on a 7-year project and has just landed close to the fourth star. The spacecraft launched in August 2018 and arrived at a distance from the Sun in around 6.4 million km, becoming the closest spacecraft to the Sun in history. Parker is monitoring the flow of energy behind the corona and the solar wind, identifying the structure and aerodynamics of the plasma and magnetic field, exploring the mechanism that helps energy particles accelerate and circulate, according to NASA.

Solar Orbiter has a long service time of 7 years.

Taken together, the two projects can help uncover the mysteries of the Sun and provide more data to researchers than to operate independently. Parker can sample particles near the Sun while Solar Orbiter will fly farther for a wider view. Sometimes, two spacecraft will fly in line with each other to measure the magnetic field or solar wind.

The Solar Orbiter also has a 7-year operating time and flies 42 million km from the Sun. The ship can withstand the heat of the Sun thanks to its titanium phosphate-coated heat shield that keeps the vehicle operating at temperatures up to 521 degrees Celsius.