This morning, the European Space Agency and NASA released the first round of images from Solar Orbiter. Launched on February 10, this mission took a fast path to the Sun and is now sending back images from closer to the sun than any mission that has come before.

Solar Orbiter is one of two missions currently flying near the Sun. Working in collaboration with the Parker Solar Probe, which launched in 2018, these two missions are studying the details of our Sun’s magnetic fields and atmosphere as well as the temperature structure of its outermost layers. 

In today’s image release, the team operating Solar Orbiter discussed the challenges they’ve had working to operate a mission with ten scientific instruments when most of the team has to work from home. To see them succeed and also have early science results is really a testament to this team’s ability to collaborate over the internet, and it’s an argument for allowing folks to keep working from home if they want to when and if things ever get back to normal.

Their images caught a previously predicted phenomenon called “campfires”. According to David Berghmans, principal investigator of the EUI high-res imager: The campfires are little relatives of the solar flares that we can observe from Earth, million or billion times smaller. The Sun might look quiet at first glance, but when we look in detail, we can see those miniature flares everywhere we look.”

More data is still needed to understand the temperature profile of the campfires, and that data will be coming in the future from the SPICE instrument. When we have the results, we’ll bring them to you here on the Daily Space.

More Information

European Space Agency press release 

NASA press release 

UK Space Agency press release 

NASA media advisory (July 13)