
Solar Orbiter first images revealed - mauliknshah
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2020/07/Solar_Orbiter_first_images_revealed
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chrisco255
Many years ago I experienced a VR tour of the solar system on Oculus. I never
fully comprehended just how big the sun was until going on that tour.
Something about being able to float around in space, and see the planets
stacked next to the sun going off into the horizon and looking up and down and
all around at the sun, just a really cool VR exclusive experience.

Fascinated to hear what they learn from this orbiter. We're currently in the
deepest solar minimum of the space age, so I wonder if they'll discover
anything related to the mechanisms that drive them.

~~~
dylan604
I "hacked" NASA (I used wget/curl to download the publicly available images)
to get the specific shots (wavelength/resolution) from SOHO to get an entire
11 day's worth of a single rotation of the sun. We put that sequence into a VR
setting. It was strictly for a demo/PoC of an idea we were knocking around.
The idea didn't gain any traction with the producers, so it just got shelved.
It was fun showing everyone how simple parsing a structured text file, passing
that data to another app for downloading, renaming/sorting to proper image
sequence format. Start it, (stop/start 2 or 3 times to fix typo bugs), walk
away for the weekend to come back on monday to see stuff ready to go.

Many thanks to anyone at NASA/ESA/JAXA/anyone else that makes all of that data
available!!

~~~
enriquto
The data is public and this usage seems to be intended, not sure why you call
it "hacking".

~~~
dylan604
I quoted the word hack deliberately. There have been well known cases of
people being brought up on charges for using elite hacking software known as
curl and/or wget.

Also, it's what my co-workers called it. These are non-coder types, and can
operate a computer just well enough to use the software they are trained to
use. I use the Homebrew color scheme in Terminal, so green text on black
background. Only hackers use Terminal anyway, so 1 + 1 = ? (you better have
said 10)

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memorysafety
What is this thing here?
[https://i.imgur.com/hxiwfe6.png](https://i.imgur.com/hxiwfe6.png) (around
25%-25% from top left)

Looks distinctly not part of the corona, more like a pod of some sorts, and it
also jitters around in the video. I'm puzzled!

~~~
JohannesH
Maybe damage to the instruments?

~~~
Certified
It is definitely a spacecraft side instrumentation artifact. Notice how all
three of these jiggle the same?
[https://imgur.com/a/T7jduVG](https://imgur.com/a/T7jduVG)

~~~
danbr
‘"But in fact, it's a sensor defect," he said. "In future processing when we
further optimize this, this will be cleaned up and interpolated from nearby
pixels. But for the moment, it's still clearly visible."’

[https://www.livescience.com/sun-tardigrade-solar-orbiter-
ima...](https://www.livescience.com/sun-tardigrade-solar-orbiter-images.html)

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mirimir
Those are some amazingly beautiful images. And for some reason, I'm reminded
of the comet-core ship that surfs just above the Sun's convection tops in _The
Killing Star_ , by Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski. Also the
~analogous ships mentioned in Vernor Vinge's _Marooned in Realtime_ , and in
Hannu Rajaniemi's "Flower Prince" trilogy.

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mcbits
I love watching video of activity on the solar surface because my brain has no
intuition for the immense gravity and plasma dynamics at play. It's almost
like getting a glimpse of a world with different laws of physics.

~~~
gorgoiler
If I were to visit the sun I’d probably orbit it close up, rather than landing
on the surface. Seems like the sensible thing to do.

Being in orbit, I would sense weightlessness while being in the presences of
an enormous gravitational field. Just as in orbit around earth: gravity is
still there, you just can’t feel it.

Would I notice anything different when weightlessly orbiting something
300,000x more massive than earth?

~~~
imglorp
> Would I notice anything different when weightlessly orbiting something
> 300,000x more massive than earth?

Yes, due to tidal forces being stronger at one end of you than the other. You
could use the formula given below but it looks like about a quarter of a
newton.

One other thing: not sure you could "land on the surface" because it's all
plasma. Flying through it might be interesting.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification)

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jcun4128
Haha these cookie popups, I don't know why I'm hesitant to take action on
them. So like this site on mobile I'll read the article through half my phone
screen.

~~~
moritonal
Fun fact, the video changes from a direct video element to a YouTube element
if you accept the cookie banner.

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gorgoiler
...which is then promptly blocked by my browser.

The video is only playable if I _don’t_ click the cookie nag.

~~~
pteraspidomorph
This does not happen on my end. I wonder why? I'm in Europe and using Firefox
with tracking protection, Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin (and no cookie
popup killers of any kind). No sign of youtube, and the native element
functions properly.

EDIT: Tried also on Chrome. Accepted only essential cookies. No youtube.
(Chrome also has uBlock Origin installed, though I don't know how effective
that currently is.)

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sdenton4
This is another reminder of just how little space exploration has happened so
far... I'm kinda amazed no one's ever just thrown a probe at the sun to get as
much data as possible before it burns. I get a similar feeling staring at the
bare handful of images from the surface of Venus.

~~~
Ankaios
Flying close to the Sun is hard, both because of the thermal environment and
the difficulty of achieving trajectories that get close. A mission that
launched two years ago, Parker Solar Probe, is actually going to get closer.
Parker and Solar Orbiter have different objectives and should complement each
other well.

[http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/](http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/)

~~~
lattalayta
Ya, at first glance it seems easier to get to the sun, but due to orbital
mechanics it's actually harder than it seems.

 _Probes bound for deep-space destinations like Mars can piggyback off Earth’s
momentum to fly faster. For a spacecraft to launch toward the sun, on the
other hand, it must accelerate to nearly match the Earth’s velocity—in the
opposite direction. With the planet’s motion essentially canceled out, the
spacecraft can surrender to the sun’s gravity and begin to fall toward it._
[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/parker-s...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/parker-
solar-probe-launch-nasa/567197/)

~~~
op03
Interesting article thx.

I dont get why the speed up works only towards the outer solar system though.
Why does it have to loose speed to control direction?

~~~
zaarn
The direction is "towards" or "away" from the sun, the only way to get closer
to the sun is to make your orbit smaller, the only way to do that is to slow
down in your current orbit. You can't reach a lower orbit by accelerating.
(I'm simplifying a bit, it's all acceleration, what matters is if it's in your
orbital velocity, prograde, or against it, retrograde)

~~~
sandworm101
You can accelerate so slow down. The flyby of a planet creates an
accelleration that, if in the correct direction, results in a slower orbital
velocity in the sun's reference frame. In really simple terms, if you approach
the planet from the right (in a counterclockwise solar system) you speed up,
if you aim to the left you slow down. The velocity is transferred to/from the
planet.

[https://youtu.be/hKjcbmlAaYY](https://youtu.be/hKjcbmlAaYY)

Notice how the probes orbit gets more eccentric but still smaller each time it
approaches a planet on the left. The gravity assist is slowing it down, again
in the solar reference frame.

~~~
zaarn
Gravitational slingshots are a method were you accelerate and end up slowing
down but I don't think it's fair to say that you "just accelerate to reach a
lower orbit", since your acceleration ultimately ends up being either
retrograde for very low fly-by orbits or on the normal/radial axis. Or
possibly even prograde.

Basically, using a flyby to apply retrograde speed is not much more than
accelerating prograde and then using the gravity of a planet to A) move your
orbital position without a speed change and/or B) redirect your acceleration.

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dylan604
Kind of surprised this orbiter was not called Icarus

~~~
marsRoverDev
That name was floating around internally on the engineering teams until we'd
ironed out the kinks.

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knorker
"Published", not "revealed".

I'm sorry. This just annoys me so much. There's two perfectly good words that
pretty much always should be used instead of "revealed": "Published", or
"Announced".

