In 2022, Solar Orbiter will close to within 48 million kilometers of the Sun's surface, more than 20 million kilometers closer than it will go in 2021. By the end of 2021 all instruments will be working together in preparation to approach the sun. On 27 December 2020, Solar Orbiter completed its first Venus flyby. At that distance, Solar Orbiter has been able to observe solar processes that are still relatively pristine and have not had their properties modified by subsequent transport and propagation processes. Launch Notes: This will be the 137th mission for United Launch Alliance. A cost-reduced Solar Orbiter mission was studied in the 1990s, and a more capable Solar Probe mission served as one of the centerpieces of the eponymous Outer Planet/Solar Probe. The European Space Operations Center (ESOC) in Germany will operate Solar Orbiter after launch. The orbit trail is extended to better illustrate the changes to the orbit plane implemented using gravity-assists from Venus. A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket launched the Solar Orbiter mission on Monday, Februat 4:03 AM (UTC). Launch date: 12 August 2018, 07:31 UTC : Rocket: Delta IV Heavy / Star-48BV: Launch site: Cape Canaveral, SLC-37: Contractor: United Launch Alliance. This visualization illustrates the trajectory of Solar Orbiter during it s multi-year study of the Sun. Solar Orbiter makes in-situ measurements of the solar wind plasma, fields, waves, and energetic particles by traveling closer to the sun than the previous record-holders, Helios 1 and 2 – traveling nearly three-quarters of the way to the sun, a journey of approximately 67 million miles. Oblique view of Solar Orbiter orbit evolution, based on the actual launch date to the nominal end-of-mission. The inclined orbit has allowed Solar Orbiter to better image the regions around the sun’s poles than ever before. There, it will help us better understand and predict the Sun’s behaviour, on which life on Earth depends. The spacecraft will brave the fierce heat and carry its scientific instruments to just one-quarter of Earths distance from our star. When travelling at its fastest, Solar Orbiter has remained positioned over approximately the same region of the solar atmosphere as the sun rotates on its axis, allowing unprecedented observations. Solar Orbiter was launched in February 2020 and is on its way to perform close-up studies of our Sun. It will take three years to reach this orbit. Solar Orbiter has been placed into an elliptical orbit around the sun coming as close to 26 million miles away from the star every five months - even closer than Mercury. Solar Orbiter is a joint ESA/NASA collaboration that will address a central question of heliophysics: How does the sun create and control the giant bubble of magnetic fields around it, the heliosphere?
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