Solar Orbiter blasts off in mission to the sun
February 10, 2020
A joint US-European team successfully launched the Space Orbiter probe on Sunday night from the US state of Florida on a mission to "address big questions" about the solar system, including taking the first-ever high-resolution pictures of the sun's poles.
Space Orbiter blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral at 11:03 p.m. Sunday (0403 UTC Monday) atop an Atlas V411 rocket.
The US space agency, NASA, and European Space Agency (ESA) are collaborating on the mission, which will be controlled from the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, in southwestern Germany.
Mission controllers at the center "received a signal from the spacecraft indicating that its solar panels had successfully deployed," NASA announced in a statement.
Space Orbiter is equipped with 10 scientific instruments and weighs 1,800 kilograms (4,000 pounds). The joint project mission came at a cost of almost €1.5 billion ($1.66 billion). The journey could last up to nine years, and the probe will reach primary scientific orbit in two years.
What's it doing?
Information from Space Orbiter is expected to provide insights into the sun's atmosphere, its winds and its magnetic fields, including how it shapes the heliosphere, the vast swath of space that encompasses our system.
"By the end of our Solar Orbiter mission, we will know more about the hidden force responsible for the sun's changing behavior and its influence on our home planet than ever before," said Günther Hasinger, the ESA's director of science. Hasinger added that this could provide useful information about how powerful solar storms could disrupt everyday life.
kmm/ng (AP, AFP, dpa)
Each evening at 1830 UTC, DW's editors send out a selection of the day's hard news and quality feature journalism. You can sign up to receive it directly here.