The reason we were here in Florida was for the launch of this: the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter mission.
Solar Orbiter was, on date of launch, the most complex scientific laboratory ever to have been sent to the Sun.
Solar Orbiter will take images of the Sun from closer than any spacecraft before and for the first time look at its uncharted polar regions. By combining observations from Solar Orbiter’s six remote-sensing instruments and four sets of in situ instruments, scientists hoped to find answers to some profound questions: What drives the Sun’s 11-year cycle of rising and subsiding magnetic activity? What heats up the upper layer of its atmosphere, the corona, to millions of degrees Celsius? What drives the generation of the solar wind? What accelerates the solar wind to speeds of hundreds of kilometres per second? And how does it all affect our planet?
We watched the launch from the Space Launch Complex 41 pad (US Atlas V 411 rocket) from the bleachers at Kennedy Space Center.
