UK solar orbiter tracks sun
The UK celebrates 50 years in space by building a solar orbiter providing the closest ever view of the sun, a mission that will help scientists understand the causes of space weather.
Astrium UK in Stevenage, north of London, is to build the orbiter to investigate how the sun creates and controls the heliosphere, the extended atmosphere of the sun. The scheduled launch date is 2017 with a seven-year mission lifetime.
Astrium will fund the mission with a 300m euro contract awarded by the European Space Agency and lead a team of European companies supplying various parts of the spacecraft and scientific instruments funded by Europeans and the U.S.
“This is testimony to the important role that the UK has played in space flight since the launch of Ariel-1 in 1962,” “Stevenage in the UK,” said Prof. Giménez Cañete, the ESA’s director of science and robotic exploration.
Closer to the sun than Mercury
The spacecraft will carry instruments to measure the particles, fields and waves of the plasma through which it travels, and observe the sun’s surface and outer atmosphere, the photosphere and corona, Astrium said.
At its closest point, the solar orbiter will be closer to the sun than the planet Mercury, at a distance of 0.28 Astronomical Units (42 million kilometres), in an orbit that takes it out of the ecliptic plane.
From here, it will perform long-duration observations of the same region of the sun’s surface, and have visibility of the sun’s polar regions, one of the closest approaches of the sun by any spacecraft.
The solar orbiter continues a long tradition of European Sun explorers, including Helios 1 and 2, Ulysses, and SOHO, all in partnership with NASA, as well as ESA’s PROBA-2.