
Solar Orbiter is a collaboration between NASA and ESA, designed and built by a team led by Airbus. Launched in February 2020, it will observe the sun in unprecedented detail, as shown in this artist's impression.

To protect it against the sun's heat, Solar Orbiter is coated with SolarBlack, made of charred bone. The coating was developed by Irish company ENBIO.

Solar Orbiter was launched inside the US Atlas V 411 rocket, pictured at the Astrotech payload processing facility in Florida, during launch preparations on 21 January 2020.

During testing, the engineering model of Solar Orbiter's sun shield was lowered into a vacuum chamber at ESA's Technical Centre, in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. The test creates a vacuum, while the chamber walls are pumped with -190°C liquid nitrogen to mimic the extreme cold of deep space. Mirrors focus the light from 19 lamps into a concentrated beam of artificial sunlight on the sun shield for several days.

An artist's impression of Solar Orbiter after it separated from the upper stage of the rocket that launched it into space.

In the first year of its mission, Solar Orbiter has collected valuable data. This image was taken on 30 May 2020 and shows the sun's appearance at the extreme ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Images at this wavelength reveal the upper atmosphere of the sun, the corona, with a temperature of around 1 million degrees Celsius.

This image shows a map of the magnetic properties of the sun. Taken on 18 June 2020, there is a large magnetically active region in the lower right-hand area of the sun.

Solar Orbiter reached its first perihelion, the point in its orbit closest to the sun, on 15 June 2020 — 77 million kilometers from its surface.

Solar Orbiter captured the many faces of the sun in different wavelengths of light during its first close pass.

This image shows the sun's granulation pattern that results from the movement of hot plasma under the sun's visible surface.
