Probe

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Europe's Solar Orbiter (SolO) spacecraft making its first pass close to The Sun on Monday, tracking by, in a distance of just over 77 million km.

it was in February , and is on a mission to understand what drives The Star 's dynamic behaviour.

The narrow pass, known as the perihelion, the Probe , between the orbits of Venus and mercury.

In The Coming years, SolO is going to close, even closer, to within 43 million km of The Sun on occasions.

As it stands today, only five other missions have dived deeper into the inner Solar System : Mariner 10 , Helios 1 & 2, Messenger and.

the earth revolves 149 million kilometers (93 million miles) on average from The Sun .

SolO is an European Space Agency (Esa) craft, which was built in the UK by the aerospace company Airbus.

she spent The Four months since the launch, is currently undergoing a checkout period. The engineers have run the rule over all of the sample systems and commissioning of the 10 scientific instruments.

Routine operations for the full suite of on-Board experiments are gone for another year, But SolO's is a magnetometer is up and running and will continue to do so.

Sitting at The End of a long boom at the rear of the Probe , MAY sense the magnetic fields embedded in the solar Wind - The Stream of charged particles away, and rolled over The Sun .

Already, the instrument, catch the disturbances by large explosions on The Star called coronal mass ejections, in addition to day-to-day waves and turbulence, the trace of The Wind structure.

"We Switched On , on the 24th of February - we already have over 2 billion magnet field vectors on the ground. We have a happy, busy, the science team, the data work," said Prof.

One of the reasons why The British group got the instrument, turned on very early on was to generate, so it could characterize to begin, the disturbing magnetic fields, the the electronics the rest of the spacecraft. This signal is small, But must be deducted from The Sun from measurements of the finesse of the Details in the data correctly.

The Early Start , the " London team gave the opportunity to the tandem study with the magnetometer instrument on the Esa BepiColombo mission. As luck would have it, this Probe will return to earth in April on the way to mercury. The two missions were, therefore, capable of multi-point sensing " of the solar Wind in relatively close proximity to each other.

The same was also the case of The American Parker Solar - sensor - But on a much larger separation. This U.S. mission is in The Process of making some very deep dives past The Sun (at the 7. June, it took only 19 million km from The Star ).

"are We flying now only one of a constellation of satellites around The Sun ," Prof Horbury told Bbc News .

The Next big event for the SolO is a flyby of Venus, which will be carried out to help manage your spiral in the direction of The Star .

This is done at The End of December and you can see the Probe track over 500,000 km above the surface of The Planet .

The full science phase of The Mission is expected to begin in the year 2021, if all 10 of the SolO instruments, including the Imager, to start regular observations.

"I was so nervous when we started," said Prof Horbury. "I think the more you know about a project, the more you know about the things that can go wrong. But Solar Orbiter is Out There , it works, and it will be a great Success . "

solar orbiter, airbus group, space exploration, the sun, european space agency

Source of news: bbc.com