from Hacker News

Solar Orbiter gets world-first views of the Sun's poles

by sohkamyung on 6/11/25, 11:00 PM with 28 comments

• by superkuh on 6/14/25, 1:45 PM

  This slightly tilted view of the poles is a teaser. I didn't know they'd managed to incorporate late in the mission gravity assists into the cheaper plan B to slightly tweak out of the ecliptic while dropping close to the sun. That's pretty cool. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Animatio...

  But we could've had so much more. The original proposal A for the ESA Solar Orbiter was a highly inclined orbit relative to the ecliptic plane to truly get full polar views of the sun. But this was too expensive. So they went with the cheaper proposal B which was mostly just a spectroscopic platform. Similar to SDO AIA, except in a solar orbit (almost completely within the ecliptic plane) instead of SDO AIA's Earth based sun synchronous orbit.

• by ahmedfromtunis on 6/14/25, 11:03 PM

  I didn't even realize that we've never seen the sun's poles before as I just assumed we already scanned our star many times over.

  A nice reminder of how patchy and limited our knowledge is despite the impression of the opposite.

  Keep up the great work, humans!

• by sandworm101 on 6/14/25, 5:19 PM

  Dambit. No hexagons. I think i might have lost an old bet.

• by lostlogin on 6/14/25, 6:34 PM

  ‘World First’ is a poor choice of words. ‘First Ever’?

• by colordrops on 6/14/25, 9:45 PM

  I love this, seems so minor if not paying attention but it's absolutely mind blowing. Getting a view we never saw of the life giver, an object that used to be revered as a god, nearly every human alive I history has basked in it's light and heat, and the for the first time we are seeing it in full

• by wtcactus on 6/15/25, 7:27 AM

  This allegation is incorrect.

  The Ulysses spacecraft had already did that in 1994-1995.

  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(spacecraft)