Solar Orbiter gets world-first views of the Sun's poles
26 comments
·June 11, 2025lostlogin
‘World First’ is a poor choice of words. ‘First Ever’?
riffraff
well, they are the first time they're seen on this world so I think it's fine.
lionkor
It's our world's first -- maybe the others already got it.
Or better, "humanity's first".
bravesoul2
Happened outside our world though!
throwaway81523
There was a previous mission (Ulysses aka International Solar Polar mission) that sent back a lot of data but for whatever reason, they didn't have it send visual images. Big bright ball = no surprise, maybe.
superkuh
This slightly tilted view of the poles is a teaser. I didn't know they'd managed to incorporate late in the mission gravity assists into the cheaper plan B to slightly tweak out of the ecliptic while dropping close to the sun. That's pretty cool. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Animatio...
But we could've had so much more. The original proposal A for the ESA Solar Orbiter was a highly inclined orbit relative to the ecliptic plane to truly get full polar views of the sun. But this was too expensive. So they went with the cheaper proposal B which was mostly just a spectroscopic platform. Similar to SDO AIA, except in a solar orbit (almost completely within the ecliptic plane) instead of SDO AIA's Earth based sun synchronous orbit.
BurningFrog
They plan to get a more polar orbit each time they get close to Venus: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/01/Solar_Orbi...
Not sure if 33° angle in 2029 is the final "polarity" or if they'll keep tilting after that.
NooneAtAll3
you linked Parker probe, not Solar Orbiter
jbjorge
"But in the end, it doesn't even matter"
hcarvalhoalves
I suppose it takes a lot of deltaV to get a stable orbit over the sun poles?
perihelions
It's doable with gravity assists. Ulysses got up to 79° inclination using a Jupiter flyby.
ChocolateGod
You'd need to completely cancel out the rotation of the solar system, far beyond what we have the technology to do.
sandworm101
It does, but most of the needed dV is harvested from the planets during gravity assists. The probe is accelerated/turned several hundred or thousand m/s and in exchange the planets it passes are shifted/slowed/turned by maybe 0.00000000000000000000001 m/s. In this case, the probe largely needs to slow down, to bleed of the speed it got from being at earth's orbit, so the planets are probably being accelerated.
sandworm101
Dambit. No hexagons. I think i might have lost an old bet.
svachalek
Ha. I wonder what solar scientists were expecting here, how surprising would it have been if the sun did have polygonal storms like the gas giants?
bravesoul2
From a simulation? NVidia had come a long way since you made the bet.
sandworm101
No. From the realwold cyclonic storms of Saturn and Jupiter that form unnatural-looking polygons at their poles.
tickerticker
LOL
colordrops
I love this, seems so minor if not paying attention but it's absolutely mind blowing. Getting a view we never saw of the life giver, an object that used to be revered as a god, nearly every human alive I history has basked in it's light and heat, and the for the first time we are seeing it in full
aaron695
[dead]
I didn't even realize that we've never seen the sun's poles before as I just assumed we already scanned our star many times over.
A nice reminder of how patchy and limited our knowledge is despite the impression of the opposite.
Keep up the great work, humans!