About

• Solar Orbiter is an international collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA, to study the Sun.
• Solar Orbiter was launched to space aboard the US Atlas V 411 rocket from NASA’s spaceport in Cape Canaveral, Florida on 10 February 2020.
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• Solar Orbiter carries a set of ten instruments for imaging the surface of the Sun and studying the environment in its vicinity.
• The spacecraft will also capture the first images of the sun’s polar regions.
• The spacecraft will travel around the Sun on an elliptical orbit that will take it as close as 42 million km away from the Sun’s surface, about a quarter of the distance between the Sun and Earth.
• The orbit will allow the Solar Orbiter to see some of the never-before-imaged regions of the Sun, including the poles, and shed new light on what gives rise to solar wind, which can affect infrastructure on Earth.

Why in News?

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• The first images from ESA/NASA’s Solar Orbiter are now available to the public, including the closest pictures ever taken of the Sun.
• Among the novel insights from the images are views of mini-flares dubbed “campfires”.

What are ‘campfires’?

• The campfires are the miniature versions of solar flares, at least a million times smaller.
• It’s possible they are mini-explosions known as nanoflares – tiny but ubiquitous sparks theorized to help heat the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, to its temperature 300 times hotter than the solar surface.