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Table 1.
Solar Orbiter mission summary.
| Top-level science questions | – What drives the solar wind and where does the coronal magnetic field originate? |
| – How do solar transients drive heliospheric variability? | |
| – How do solar eruptions produce energetic particle radiation that fills the heliosphere? | |
| – How does the solar dynamo work and drive connections between the Sun and the heliosphere? | |
| Science payload | In-situ instruments: |
| – Energetic Particle Detector (EPD, Rodríguez-Pacheco et al. 2020) | |
| – Magnetometer (MAG, Horbury et al. 2020a) | |
| – Radio and Plasma Wave analyser (RPW, Maksimovic et al. 2020a) | |
| – Solar Wind Analyser (SWA, Owen et al. 2020) | |
| Remote-sensing instruments: | |
| – Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI, Rochus et al. 2020) | |
| – Visible light and UV Coronagraph (Metis, Antonucci et al. 2020) | |
| – Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (SO/PHI, Solanki et al. 2020) | |
| – Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI, Howard et al. 2020) | |
| – EUV Imaging Spectrograph (SPICE, SPICE Consortium 2020) | |
| – X-ray Spectrometer/Telescope (STIX, Krucker et al. 2020) | |
| Mission profile | – Launched on 10 February 2020 04:03 UTC, on NASA-provided Atlas V 411 |
| – Interplanetary cruise with chemical propulsion and seven gravity assists at Venus and one at Earth to decrease perihelion distance | |
| – Venus resonance orbits with multiple GAMs to increase inclination | |
| Closest perihelion | 0.28 AU (furthest aphelion: 1.02 AU) |
| Orbital period | 150−180 days |
| Max. heliolatitude | –7° (cruise phase) |
| – 18° (nominal mission, reached first on 22 March 2025) | |
| – 24° (start of extended mission, reached first on 28 January 2027) | |
| – 33° (extended mission, reached first on 24 July 2029) | |
| Spacecraft | Three-axis stabilised platform, heat shield, two adjustable, single-sided solar arrays of dimensions: 2.5 m × 3.1 m × 2.7 m (launch configuration, i.e. with folded solar arrays), launch mass ∼1720 kg, incl. 248.7 kg fuel (149.0 kg nitrogen tetroxide and 99.7 kg monomethylhydrazine) |
| Telemetry band | Dual X-band |
| Data downlink | 150 kbit s−1 at 1 AU spacecraft–Earth distance (requirement; higher in-orbit performance) |
| Nominal mission duration | 7 years (incl. cruise phase, nominal mission defined to start with the Earth GAM on 26 November 2021 and to end with the fifth Venus GAM on 24 December 2026) |
| Extended mission duration | 3 years |
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