In 2022, Solar Orbiter will close to within 48 million kilometers of the Sun's surface, more than 20 million kilometers closer than it will go in 2021. Solar Orbiter/EUI Team (ESA & NASA) Image caption, The arrow points to a 'camp fire'. Together with data and images from Solar Orbiter’s other instruments. On 14 March, the spacecraft will pass the orbit of Mercury, the scorched inner planet of our Solar System, and on 26 March it will reach closest approach to the Sun. By the end of 2021 all instruments will be working together in preparation to approach the sun. The European Solar Orbiter probe captures images just 77 million km from the Suns surface. The ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft is speeding towards its historic first close pass of the Sun. That craft is making the closest-ever approach to the Sun just 0.04 au but does. On 27 December 2020, Solar Orbiter completed its first Venus flyby. The Solar Orbiter is heading to the Sun after NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which launched in August 2018. At that distance, Solar Orbiter has been able to observe solar processes that are still relatively pristine and have not had their properties modified by subsequent transport and propagation processes. Solar Orbiter makes in-situ measurements of the solar wind plasma, fields, waves, and energetic particles by traveling closer to the sun than the previous record-holders, Helios 1 and 2 – traveling nearly three-quarters of the way to the sun, a journey of approximately 67 million miles. Aurora could be present throughout the solar system, say scientists studying the magnetic environment around Mercury during a brief spacecraft flyby. The inclined orbit has allowed Solar Orbiter to better image the regions around the sun’s poles than ever before. The evidence for aurora on Mercury comes from a flyby of the BepiColumbo spacecraft, which is on its way to study the planet, but is performing several flybys to slow down enough to go into orbit. Scientists from NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) will release the first data captured by Solar Orbiter, the joint ESA/NASA mission to study the Sun, during an online news briefing at 8 a.m. When travelling at its fastest, Solar Orbiter has remained positioned over approximately the same region of the solar atmosphere as the sun rotates on its axis, allowing unprecedented observations. It will take three years to reach this orbit. Solar Orbiter has been placed into an elliptical orbit around the sun coming as close to 26 million miles away from the star every five months - even closer than Mercury. Solar Orbiter is a joint ESA/NASA collaboration that will address a central question of heliophysics: How does the sun create and control the giant bubble of magnetic fields around it, the heliosphere?
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