The Euro-American probe Solar Orbiter took off in the night from Sunday to Monday from Florida to the Sun. A Swiss X-ray telescope, STIX, developed at the University of Applied Sciences of North-West Switzerland (FHNW), is on board.
The European Space Agency (ESA) probe successfully launched at 11:03 p.m. (5:03 a.m. Monday in Switzerland) from Cape Canaveral, Florida, launched by an American rocket in partnership with NASA. On board: ten scientific instruments (209 kilos of payload) for a mission at 1.5 billion euros. She will study during the next decade these particle-laden storms that can cause breakdowns on Earth.
After passing through the orbit of Venus, then that of Mercury, the satellite, whose maximum speed will reach 245,000 km / h, will approach 42 million kilometers from the Sun, less than a third of the distance Sun-Earth.
Solar Orbiting “will have the ability to look at the Sun directly,” explains Matthieu Berthomier, CNRS researcher at the plasma physics laboratory of the École Polytechnique, to AFP.
The probe will be closest to the Sun every six months, just 42 million kilometers away, that is, closer to the Sun than Mercury. It is protected by a heat shield because it will be very hot, around 600 ° C.
“When we are so close to the Sun, we have no energy problem, but we have a temperature problem,” said Friday from Kennedy Space Center Ian Walters, project manager at Airbus, who built the ‘apparatus.
The new data collected will complement those of NASA’s Parker probe, launched in 2018, which approached much more of the surface of the star (7 to 8 million km), but without direct observation technology, the heat being too intense.
With six imaging instruments (remote sensing), the European probe will be able to “see” the star at a distance never before equaled. And reveal the poles of the Sun, of which we currently only know the equatorial regions. Four other “in situ” instruments will be used to probe the environment around the Sun.
Main objective of the mission: “to understand how the Sun creates and controls the heliosphere”, the bubble of matter surrounding the entire solar system, summarizes Anne Pacros, ESA mission and payload manager.