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The Solar Orbiter mission launch will take place on the night from the 9th to the 10th of February. The Solar Orbiter will study the Sun in detail thanks to the combination of scientific instruments it has and the orbit it will draw around. The probe will get closer to the Sun –up to a distance of 42 million kilometres, meaning that the parts of the Solar Orbital that look towards the Sun will have to be exposed to temperatures over 500ºC, while the parts remaining in the shadow will be around -180ºC. During this mission, the orbit will increase its inclination towards the ecliptic up to 30ºC, which will enable researchers getting high resolution images of the solar poles.


A team of ICCUB researchers has worked on one of the ten facilities of the Solar Orbiter. This instrument is called SO/PHI (Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager), which will provide high precision measures of the magnetic field of the solar photosphere. The team took care of the development and implementation of an Image Stabilization System (ISS), which will enable the balance of the probe movements to get images with the required quality. Furthermore, the researchers from the Heliospheric Physics and Space Weather (HPSWG) of the UB provided scientific support to the team of the Energetic Particle Detector (EPD). The members of HPSWG, experts in data analysis and modelling, developed models to predict the environment of particle radiation the Solar Orbiter will find, and are working on tools to ease the analysis of the measures of the particles it will collect.



Read the whole article at the University of Barcelona News