The new deep space antenna will support ESA's flagship missions, including Juice, Solar Orbiter, BepiColombo, Mars Express, and Hera, when it becomes operational in 2026.
The Solar Orbiter will help monitor solar storm formation.
The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter cost $1.5 billion.
Solar Orbiter provided images of the Sun from latitudes higher than 25 degrees.
Sener Aerospace’s work has supported missions and programs including HRE, SEOSAT/Ingenio, CHIME, LSTM, Hubble, Rosetta, SMOS, Pléiades, Herschel & Planck, JUICE, Athena, Solar Orbiter, Proba-3, Gaia, BepiColombo, ExoMars, Curiosity, Euclid, LISA Pathfinder, MTG, FLEX, LOP Gateway, Mars2020, Earth Explorers, COPERNICUS, and Galileo.
Solar Orbiter will reach closest approach to the Sun on 2022-03-26.
Solar Orbiter will spend from 2022-03-14 to 2022-04-06 inside the orbit of Mercury.
All ten instruments on Solar Orbiter will be operating simultaneously during the 2022-03-26 perihelion passage.
Solar Orbiter will launch no earlier than 2031 on an Ariane 6 rocket.
Solar Orbiter was the first M-class mission selected under Cosmic Vision and launched in February 2020.
ESOC restarted Solar Orbiter operations first because the spacecraft, launched 2020-02-09, was still undergoing instrument commissioning and was operating in a manual mode.
Solar Orbiter launched on 2020-02-09 on an Atlas V rocket and remained in the early phases of commissioning its instruments at the time of the suspension.
The joint European Space Agency-NASA Solar Orbiter launched on 2020-02-09 to observe the sun’s poles, outer atmosphere, and solar wind.
Solar Orbiter is equipped with a sunshield that is based on the sunshield used by ESA’s BepiColombo mission to Mercury.
By 2025 Solar Orbiter’s orbit will be inclined so the spacecraft reaches a solar latitude of 17 degrees at closest approach, rising to 33 degrees by 2029.
The Solar Orbiter spacecraft has a mass of 1,800 kg and was built by Airbus Defence and Space for the European Space Agency.