Solar Orbiter: Mission to study the sun

LAUNCHED IN February 2020 from Cape Canaveral, a 1.7-tonne spacecraft called the Solar Orbiter aims to get up-close images of the Sun from 42 million kilometres away, while measuring its energetic behaviour in real-time. The suite of 10 on-board instruments will enable it to uniquely marry the study of events in the Sun's gaseous corona, measure its magnetic fields, and sample the solar wind as it flows past the spacecraft as a stream of energetic particles. Apart from furthering our understanding of how the Sun works, there are practical reasons why observing and better predicting the Sun's behaviour is a good idea.