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The new ESA “Solar Orbiter” probe launched from Cape Canaveral in the US state of Florida towards the sun on Monday morning. On board an Atlas V 411 rocket, the orbiter took off shortly after 5:00 a.m. (CET). At the European Space Flight Control Center (ESOC) in Darmstadt, the control team had to wait an hour to see if the probe was fully operational.
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The mission, which is estimated to be almost 1.5 billion euros, is intended to provide new insights into our home star, which is around 150 million kilometers away. The joint project between the US space agency NASA and its European counterpart Esa has ten scientific instruments on board and is controlled from Darmstadt.
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With the Institute for Space Research (IWF) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), the University of Graz and the Vienna space company RUAG Space, Austrian institutions are also involved in the mission and its preparation and implementation. The IWF was responsible for the antenna calibration and built the on-board computer for the radio wave instrument “Radio and Plasma Waves” (RPW for short). IWF chief Wolfgang Baumjohann is also a co-investigator for the magnetometer instrument (MAG), which is used to study the more stable magnetic field of the sun and the more changeable magnetic waves from the sun’s surface.
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Astrid Veronig from the Institute of Physics at the University of Graz is also a co-investigator in the “Spectrometer Imaging Telescope X-rays” (STIX). The researcher was responsible for the scientific management of software development. The telescope is supposed to take x-rays of the sun and thus clarify the question of how high-energy particles charged during solar flares are accelerated to very high speeds and how they spread in space. The Viennese space company RUAG Space is responsible for the thermal insulation of the entire satellite. With an order volume of around ten million euros, this is one of the largest single orders to date for Austria’s largest space supplier.
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