The past, present and future of solar exploration
Sending missions to the Sun isn’t the same as sending a mission to another planet. The Sun’s radiation makes it near impossible to get up close and personal. There have been many satellites launched with the purpose of observing and understanding the Sun’s activity, the first dating back to 1960 with NASA’s Pioneer 5 spacecraft.
Since then, instruments, engineering processes and our understanding of the solar environment have drastically improved. This has led to a better investigation of the Sun. A few missions that have been incredibly influential in our understanding include NASA and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission – with collaboration from NASA and the United Kingdom – called Hinode.
On 12 August 2018, NASA launched its Parker Solar Probe. With some of its results already having been mentioned, it is obvious how this mission is breaking boundaries when it comes to scrutinising the Sun. At its closest approach the PSP will travel within the Sun’s atmosphere at a distance of 3.8 million miles from the surface. This is why it is often said that this mission will ‘touch the Sun’. This mission carries with it four specially designed instrumental suites that look to answer questions about the corona and solar wind while experiencing temperatures of roughly 1,377 degrees Celsius (2,500 degrees Fahrenheit).
In 2020, the ESA will launch its Solar Orbiter, another revolutionary solar mission in its own right. This mission will get close to the Sun – but not as close as the PSP – at a distance of 41.8 million kilometres (26 million miles) from the surface. The main difference is that the Solar
Orbiter will utilise the gravity of Venus to swing it into a greater inclination, potentially as high as 33 degrees. This will allow it to probe the poles of the Sun, a feat that has never been accomplished by any other spacecraft before.