grues-dinner 5 days ago

The Solar Orbiter is 43 million km away from the Sun at its closest.

If we got 17.5ish kW per square metre here on Earth, you'd know about it (but only briefly).

2
PittleyDunkin 5 days ago

Hm, the article seems to have gotten its units wrong. Normally I'd trust the article but 43 million kilometers seems to match best with its orbit I can find documentation for.

KineticLensman 5 days ago

I was wrong with my initial jumping to conclusions, but on inspection I see that the underlying ESA press release [0] actually says "The images were taken when Solar Orbiter was less than 74 million kilometres from the Sun". Now I'm really confused.

[0] https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_...

grues-dinner 4 days ago

Presumably the images were taken on the way to perihelion. The orbit isn't circular, it's both highly eccentric and inclined relative to the ecliptic to get a view of the solar poles. A plane change is really hard on delta-v, so they tilt the orbit up bit by bit with repeated Venusian gravity assists. In the main science phase of the mission there are 14 planned perihelion approaches.

There's a diagram here, but at least some of the information there seems preliminary as they eventually launched with a black "Solar Black" heat shield coating rather than white titanium dioxide because the latter wasn't sufficiently UV-stable.

https://www.eoportal.org/satellite-missions/solar-orbiter-mi...

lovecg 5 days ago

Well, they’re _technically_ correct.

KineticLensman 5 days ago

Oops, my bad