One year after launch, the EUI telescopes are ready for their scientific mission that will officially start on December 27 2021. It might give an answer to the long standing mystery of why the solar atmosphere is much hotter than the solar surface. Researchers started debating right away this discovery. The first light of was already an excellent foretaste leading to an immediate success by revealing ‘campfires’ on the Sun. Researchers everywhere are eager to analyse such high quality and high resolution pictures. In March 2022, a next perihelion will bring us down to a third of the Earth- Sun distance. The heat shield of Solar Orbiter resisted the 4x increased heat. In the last year, several close approaches (‘perihelion’) were already made, bringing EUI half way between the Earth and the Sun. As we approach the Sun, the resolution in the images will further increase. ![]() The images shown are the first light images taken on 2020 May 12. The JHelioviewer movie starts with a view by the EUI “Full Sun” telescope and fades over to an image of one of the EUI high resolution telescopes. To make the highest possible resolution images of the solar atmosphere, Solar Orbiter was designed to bring EUI closer to the Sun than any other solar disk telescope before. The EUI support team worked relentlessly to build a firm basis such that the EUI telescopes can take pictures in the best possible conditions, with the most performant software and smoothly running techniques.ĮUI on its voyage to the Sun - Click here for a movie Answers to critical questions needed to be found: which exposure time produces the best image, how many pictures can we take per minute, do we have to finetune the data compression by the onboard computer, where are the bad bad pixels in the sensors, do the telescopes understand the uploaded computer commands, etc. This ‘First Light’ was a crucial step to get the EUI telescopes up and running and pave the path to research.ĭuring the past year, our space telescope experts had to figure out what the best way was to operate the telescopes remotely while they cruise through deep space. The 3 telescopes of the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) onboard Solar Orbiter opened their doors on to photograph the Sun.
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