ESA's Solar Orbiter Spies a Transit of Mercury - by Astroguyz
To accomplish this, SolO carries a suite of instruments, including its Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager and the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager , both of which witnessed and documented the January 3, 2023 transit of the innermost planet. All of these instruments sit behind a massive heat shield, needed to survive the intense heat of the blistering perihelion passages that the mission must endure.
“It’s not just looking at Mercury passing in front of the Sun, but passing in front of the different layers of the atmosphere,” says Miho Janvier in a recentIndeed, this offered engineers a one time chance to compare the view from their instruments versus a truly black target. “It is a certified black object traveling through your field of view,” says Daniel Müller in a recent.
SolO is part of a flotilla of missions set to scrutinize the our host star like never before, as Solar Cycle 25 gets underway in earnest. We saw evidence of this increase in activity earlier this week, as a powerful solar storm sparked aurora for mid- to high- latitudes. Views from SolO will compliment observations from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, the Solar Dynamics Observatory and the joint ESA/NASA Solar Heliospheric Observatory .
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