ESA/NASA’s Solar Orbiter carries a suite of ten instruments that work together to provide a coherent picture of solar activity and how that propagates into the wider solar system, including particles that flow out into the solar system as the solar wind.
This graphic summarizes the first images and data gathered by all instruments on ESA/NASA’s Solar Orbiter as the mission completed its commissioning phase. These include some of the instrument first light images, obtained between May and June 2020.
The instruments are grouped into two families: the remote-sensing instruments and the in situ instruments. The remote-sensing instruments look directly at the Sun, or slightly to one side to see the Sun’s surface and its outer atmosphere, the corona, while the in situ instruments measure the solar wind as it flows around the spacecraft.