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Solar Orbiter first images revealed

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Re: Solar Orbiter first images revealed

#2

Post by mirimir »

Those are some amazingly beautiful images. And for some reason, I'm reminded of the comet-core ship that surfs just above the Sun's convection tops in The Killing Star, by Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski. Also the ~analogous ships mentioned in Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime, and in Hannu Rajaniemi's "Flower Prince" trilogy.

Re: Solar Orbiter first images revealed

#3

Post by chrisco255 »

Many years ago I experienced a VR tour of the solar system on Oculus. I never fully comprehended just how big the sun was until going on that tour. Something about being able to float around in space, and see the planets stacked next to the sun going off into the horizon and looking up and down and all around at the sun, just a really cool VR exclusive experience.

Fascinated to hear what they learn from this orbiter. We're currently in the deepest solar minimum of the space age, so I wonder if they'll discover anything related to the mechanisms that drive them.

Re: Solar Orbiter first images revealed

#4

Post by sdenton4 »

This is another reminder of just how little space exploration has happened so far... I'm kinda amazed no one's ever just thrown a probe at the sun to get as much data as possible before it burns. I get a similar feeling staring at the bare handful of images from the surface of Venus.

Re: Solar Orbiter first images revealed

#5

Post by dylan604 »

chrisco255 wrote: post #3

Many years ago I experienced a VR tour of the solar system on Oculus. I never fully comprehended just how big the sun was until going on that tour. Something about being able to float around in space, and see the planets stacked next to the sun going off into the horizon and looking up and down and all around at the sun, just a really cool VR exclusive experience. Fascinated to hear what they learn from this orbiter.…

I "hacked" NASA (I used wget/curl to download the publicly available images) to get the specific shots (wavelength/resolution) from SOHO to get an entire 11 day's worth of a single rotation of the sun. We put that sequence into a VR setting. It was strictly for a demo/PoC of an idea we were knocking around. The idea didn't gain any traction with the producers, so it just got shelved. It was fun showing everyone how simple parsing a structured text file, passing that data to another app for downloading, renaming/sorting to proper image sequence format. Start it, (stop/start 2 or 3 times to fix typo bugs), walk away for the weekend to come back on monday to see stuff ready to go.

Many thanks to anyone at NASA/ESA/JAXA/anyone else that makes all of that data available!!

Re: Solar Orbiter first images revealed

#8

Post by Ankaios »

sdenton4 wrote: post #4

This is another reminder of just how little space exploration has happened so far... I'm kinda amazed no one's ever just thrown a probe at the sun to get as much data as possible before it burns. I get a similar feeling staring at the bare handful of images from the surface of Venus.

Flying close to the Sun is hard, both because of the thermal environment and the difficulty of achieving trajectories that get close. A mission that launched two years ago, Parker Solar Probe, is actually going to get closer. Parker and Solar Orbiter have different objectives and should complement each other well.

http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/

Re: Solar Orbiter first images revealed

#9

Post by lattalayta »

Ankaios wrote: post #8
sdenton4 wrote: post #4

This is another reminder of just how little space exploration has happened so far... I'm kinda amazed no one's ever just thrown a probe at the sun to get as much data as possible before it burns. I get a similar feeling staring at the bare handful of images from the surface of Venus.

Flying close to the Sun is hard, both because of the thermal environment and the difficulty of achieving trajectories that get close. A mission that launched two years ago, Parker Solar Probe, is actually going to get closer. Parker and Solar Orbiter have different objectives and should complement each other well. http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/

Ya, at first glance it seems easier to get to the sun, but due to orbital mechanics it's actually harder than it seems.

Probes bound for deep-space destinations like Mars can piggyback off Earth’s momentum to fly faster. For a spacecraft to launch toward the sun, on the other hand, it must accelerate to nearly match the Earth’s velocity—in the opposite direction. With the planet’s motion essentially canceled out, the spacecraft can surrender to the sun’s gravity and begin to fall toward it. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/parker-s...

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