Solar Orbiter first images revealed

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2020/07/Solar_Orbiter_first_images_revealed

by mauliknshah • 6 years ago

192 40 6 years ago

mirimir• 6 years ago

Those are some amazingly beautiful images. And for some reason, I'm reminded of the comet-core ship that surfs just above the Sun's convection tops in The Killing Star, by Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski. Also the ~analogous ships mentioned in Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime, and in Hannu Rajaniemi's "Flower Prince" trilogy.

chrisco255• 6 years ago

Many years ago I experienced a VR tour of the solar system on Oculus. I never fully comprehended just how big the sun was until going on that tour. Something about being able to float around in space, and see the planets stacked next to the sun going off into the horizon and looking up and down and all around at the sun, just a really cool VR exclusive experience.

Fascinated to hear what they learn from this orbiter. We're currently in the deepest solar minimum of the space age, so I wonder if they'll discover anything related to the mechanisms that drive them.

dylan6043• 6 years ago

I "hacked" NASA (I used wget/curl to download the publicly available images) to get the specific shots (wavelength/resolution) from SOHO to get an entire 11 day's worth of a single rotation of the sun. We put that sequence into a VR setting. It was strictly for a demo/PoC of an idea we were knocking around. The idea didn't gain any traction with the producers, so it just got shelved. It was fun showing everyone how simple parsing a structured text file, passing that data to another app for downloading, renaming/sorting to proper image sequence format. Start it, (stop/start 2 or 3 times to fix typo bugs), walk away for the weekend to come back on monday to see stuff ready to go.

Many thanks to anyone at NASA/ESA/JAXA/anyone else that makes all of that data available!!

zapdrive• 6 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

enriquto• 6 years ago

The data is public and this usage seems to be intended, not sure why you call it "hacking".

moritonal2• 6 years ago

I think you're talking about Titans of Space[1]. Closest thing to a Total Perspective Vortex I'd ever experienced[2].

1. http://www.titansofspacevr.com/titansofspace.html 2. https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex

sdenton4• 6 years ago

This is another reminder of just how little space exploration has happened so far... I'm kinda amazed no one's ever just thrown a probe at the sun to get as much data as possible before it burns. I get a similar feeling staring at the bare handful of images from the surface of Venus.

Ankaios• 6 years ago

Flying close to the Sun is hard, both because of the thermal environment and the difficulty of achieving trajectories that get close. A mission that launched two years ago, Parker Solar Probe, is actually going to get closer. Parker and Solar Orbiter have different objectives and should complement each other well.

http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/

lattalayta• 6 years ago

Ya, at first glance it seems easier to get to the sun, but due to orbital mechanics it's actually harder than it seems.

Probes bound for deep-space destinations like Mars can piggyback off Earth’s momentum to fly faster. For a spacecraft to launch toward the sun, on the other hand, it must accelerate to nearly match the Earth’s velocity—in the opposite direction. With the planet’s motion essentially canceled out, the spacecraft can surrender to the sun’s gravity and begin to fall toward it. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/parker-s...

lucideer• 6 years ago

kinda amazed no one's ever just thrown a probe at the sun [...] before it burns

The answer is somewhat simply that it burns real quick. These guys made the heat shield for this thing and have some decent insights: http://enbio.eu/solar-orbiter/

mnw21cam• 6 years ago

Also, it takes a heck of a lot of rocket fuel to just throw a probe at the Sun. More than to send it out of the solar system.

dylan6043• 6 years ago

Kind of surprised this orbiter was not called Icarus

mhh__• 6 years ago

Nominative determinism and all that...

marsRoverDev• 6 years ago

That name was floating around internally on the engineering teams until we'd ironed out the kinks.

jcun41282• 6 years ago

Haha these cookie popups, I don't know why I'm hesitant to take action on them. So like this site on mobile I'll read the article through half my phone screen.

moritonal2• 6 years ago

Fun fact, the video changes from a direct video element to a YouTube element if you accept the cookie banner.

gorgoiler2• 6 years ago

...which is then promptly blocked by my browser.

The video is only playable if I _don’t_ click the cookie nag.

jcun41282• 6 years ago

That's interesting, just yesterday I considered the idea of the cost(host) to have to download an entire video up front eg. video tag vs. streaming(YouTube) I wonder if that is the rationale.

mcbits2• 6 years ago

I love watching video of activity on the solar surface because my brain has no intuition for the immense gravity and plasma dynamics at play. It's almost like getting a glimpse of a world with different laws of physics.

gorgoiler2• 6 years ago

If I were to visit the sun I’d probably orbit it close up, rather than landing on the surface. Seems like the sensible thing to do.

Being in orbit, I would sense weightlessness while being in the presences of an enormous gravitational field. Just as in orbit around earth: gravity is still there, you just can’t feel it.

Would I notice anything different when weightlessly orbiting something 300,000x more massive than earth?

imglorp• 6 years ago

Would I notice anything different when weightlessly orbiting something 300,000x more massive than earth?

Yes, due to tidal forces being stronger at one end of you than the other. You could use the formula given below but it looks like about a quarter of a newton.

One other thing: not sure you could "land on the surface" because it's all plasma. Flying through it might be interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification

mcbits2• 6 years ago

I would think orbiting near the sun still just feels like free fall (as far as gravity is concerned), but close to an extremely dense object like a black hole might have enough of a gradient to feel the "spaghettification" effect or even be ripped apart by it.

Yep, that's a word! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification

koheripbal2• 6 years ago

The surface gravity of the Sun is only about 27x that of Earth (due to its lower density). More, sure, but not so much that you should consider it different physics.

...of course the temperature and hydrogen composition make it pretty different :)

memorysafety• 6 years ago

What is this thing here? https://i.imgur.com/hxiwfe6.png (around 25%-25% from top left)

Looks distinctly not part of the corona, more like a pod of some sorts, and it also jitters around in the video. I'm puzzled!

JohannesH• 6 years ago

Maybe damage to the instruments?

Certified• 6 years ago

It is definitely a spacecraft side instrumentation artifact. Notice how all three of these jiggle the same? https://imgur.com/a/T7jduVG

knorker• 6 years ago

"Published", not "revealed".

I'm sorry. This just annoys me so much. There's two perfectly good words that pretty much always should be used instead of "revealed": "Published", or "Announced".

Solar Orbiter first images revealed

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