ESA’s Solar Orbiter will be the first spacecraft to study the sun’s polar zones
A new sungazing spacecraft has launched on a mission to chart the sun’s unexplored polar regions and to understand how our star creates and controls the vast bubble of plasma that envelops the solar system. At 11:03 pm ET on February 9, the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter rocketed away from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The spacecraft now begins a nearly two-year convoluted journey — getting two gravity assists from Venus and one from Earth — to an orbit that will repeatedly take it a bit closer to the sun than Mercury gets. Slated to study the sun for at least four years starting in November 2021, Solar Orbiter is going where few spacecraft have gone. The probe will soar above and below the orbits of the planets to get a peek at the sun’s north and south poles — a region no one has yet seen. One of the mission’s many goals is to see how the poles change when the...