Solar Orbiter’s first images reveal ’campfires’ on the Sun

The first images from Solar Orbiter, a Sun-observing mission by ESA and NASA carrying instruments proposed, designed and built at UCL, reveal omnipresent miniature solar flares near the surface of our closest star. One unique aspect of the Solar Orbiter mission is that no other spacecraft has been able to take images of the Sun's surface from a closer distance. The miniature flares seen in the new images were not observable in detail before, hinting at the enormous potential of Solar Orbiter in helping scientists piece together how the Sun's atmospheric layers interact and drive the solar wind. This knowledge is vital for understanding how the Sun drives space weather events, which can disrupt and damage satellites and infrastructure on Earth. Launched in February 2020, Solar Orbiter carries six remote sensing instruments, or telescopes, that image the Sun and its surroundings, and four in-situ instruments that measure properties of the environment around the spacecraft. By comparing the data from both sets of instruments, scientists will gain insights into the generation of the solar wind, the stream of charged particles from the Sun that influences the entire Solar System. The 'campfires' shown in the first image set were captured by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) around Solar Orbiter's first perihelion, the point in its elliptical orbit closest to the Sun, in mid-June.