The Euro-American Solar Orbiter probe 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 23:03 (05:03 Monday in Switzerland) from Cape Canaveral in Florida, launched by an American rocket in the framework of a 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 Orbiter ‘will have the capacity to look at the Sun directly’, explains to AFP Matthieu Berthomier, CNRS researcher at the plasma physics laboratory of the Polytechnic school.
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 you’re so close to the Sun, you don’t have an energy problem, but you 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 from 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’ measuring instruments will be used to probe the environment around the Sun.
Main objective of the mission: ‘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.
Space weather
This bubble is bathed in a permanent stream of particles, called the solar wind, which varies greatly, in a mysterious way. Winds are sometimes disturbed by storms, caused by eruptions that eject a cloud of magnetic field and charged particles propagating in space.
These storms are difficult to predict. However, they have a direct impact on our planet: when they strike the Earth’s magnetosphere, this causes pretty and harmless northern lights, but can be more dangerous. ‘It disrupts our electromagnetic environment. This is called meteorology of space, which can affect our daily life ‘, decrypts Matthieu Berthomier.
The greatest known solar storm known to mankind, known as the ‘Carrington event’, occurred in 1859: the telegraph network in the United States was destroyed, agents received shocks, paper burned at stations, and the boreal light was visible at unprecedented latitudes (up to Central America).
In 1989 in Quebec, the modification of the magnetic field of the Earth created an electric current on a very large scale which, by domino effect, caused electrical circuits to trip, causing a gigantic blackout. Eruptions can also disrupt radars in airspace (as in 2015 in the Scandinavian sky), radio frequencies, and damage satellites.
“Imagine half of the orbiting satellites destroyed, it would be a catastrophe for humanity!”, Advises Matthieu Berthomier. By observing the solar regions which are directly linked to the wind sources, the Solar Orbiter measurements ‘will make it possible to develop models to refine the predictions’, hopes Anne Pacros.
The probe’s journey will last two years, its scientific mission between 5 and 9 years. But Cesar Garcia, project manager at ESA, said Friday that after ten years the probe would still have enough fuel to continue its work, if all goes well.
/ ATS
– .
