Solar Orbiter: Mission Goals, Recent Discoveries, and Future Outlook

ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission, launched in February 2020, is designed to investigate how the Sun creates and controls the Heliosphere, and why solar activity changes with time. To achieve its objectives, Solar Orbiter is equipped with a comprehensive suite of remote sensing and in situ instruments that work in concert to connect coronal structures and phenomena to their heliospheric counterparts. It aims to advance our understanding of the solar dynamo, responsible for the Sun’s magnetic cycle, by venturing out of the ecliptic plane to directly observe the Sun’s polar regions, providing an unprecedented view of our star. Since its launch, Solar Orbiter has completed 5 perihelion passes below the orbit of Mercury where it has taken the most detailed images of the Sun to date. The high resolution images have revealed previously unresolved coronal features that deepen our knowledge of how the corona is heated and the solar wind is formed, as well as how eruptions are triggered and release energy. As we now enter farther into solar maximum, the mission is perfectly placed to gain fresh insight to how transients drive heliospheric variability and impact local space weather. As such, the talk will present a brief overview of the overarching Solar Orbiter science objectives, discuss recent discoveries by the mission, and outlook for future observations and its exciting journey out of the ecliptic plane.