Topics Covered: Awareness in space.
NASA-ESA Solar Orbiter Spacecraft:
Context:
NASA and European Space Agency’s spacecraft has captured the first solar eruption on the Sun’s surface. These eruptions are also known as coronal mass ejections (CME).
- If these eruptions on the Sun’s surface are big enough, they can cause billions of tons of plasma and electrically charged particles to dash towards Earth.
About NASA-ESA Solar Orbiter Spacecraft:
Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA.
- The spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket in February 2020.
- It was selected as the first medium-class mission of ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 Programme.
- This is the first mission that will provide images of the sun’s north and south poles using a suite of six instruments on board that will capture the spacecraft’s view.
- It is a seven-year mission and will come within 26 million miles of the sun.
- It will be able to brave the heat of the sun because it has a custom titanium heat shield coated in calcium phosphate so that it can endure temperatures up to 970 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Solar Orbiter follows the Ulysses spacecraft, another collaboration between ESA and NASA that launched in 1990.
Solar Orbiter will set about answering four top-level science questions:
- What drives the solar wind and where does the coronal magnetic field originate from?
- How do solar transients drive heliospheric variability?
- How do solar eruptions produce energetic particle radiation that fills the heliosphere?
- How does the solar dynamo work and drive connections between the Sun and the heliosphere?
Other solar missions:
InstaLinks:
Prelims Link:
- About Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope.
- What are radio waves?
- Different layers of sun?
- What are solar flares?
- What are Sunspots?
- About Sun’s Corona.
Sources: NASA.
