- This slightly tilted view of the poles is a teaser. I didn't know they'd managed to incorporate late in the mission gravity assists into the cheaper plan B to slightly tweak out of the ecliptic while dropping close to the sun. That's pretty cool. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Animatio...by superkuh - 1 day ago
But we could've had so much more. The original proposal A for the ESA Solar Orbiter was a highly inclined orbit relative to the ecliptic plane to truly get full polar views of the sun. But this was too expensive. So they went with the cheaper proposal B which was mostly just a spectroscopic platform. Similar to SDO AIA, except in a solar orbit (almost completely within the ecliptic plane) instead of SDO AIA's Earth based sun synchronous orbit.
- Dambit. No hexagons. I think i might have lost an old bet.by sandworm101 - 1 day ago
- ‘World First’ is a poor choice of words. ‘First Ever’?by lostlogin - 24 hours ago
- I love this, seems so minor if not paying attention but it's absolutely mind blowing. Getting a view we never saw of the life giver, an object that used to be revered as a god, nearly every human alive I history has basked in it's light and heat, and the for the first time we are seeing it in fullby colordrops - 21 hours ago
- I didn't even realize that we've never seen the sun's poles before as I just assumed we already scanned our star many times over.by ahmedfromtunis - 19 hours ago
A nice reminder of how patchy and limited our knowledge is despite the impression of the opposite.
Keep up the great work, humans!
- This allegation is incorrect.by wtcactus - 11 hours ago
The Ulysses spacecraft had already did that in 1994-1995.
