The Solar Orbiter will make its closest approach to the sun on Saturday at about one third of the sun-Earth distance. We can expect some new records to be broken soon.
The European mission will look at the sun from a distance of only 30 million miles. The sun rises at 1150 GMT. The probe will break its own previous record for the closest images of the sun ever taken.
The environment it faces is so hot that it cannot carry a sun-facing camera. The job of the sun's best close-up photographer is Solar Orbiter.
The image was taken two weeks ago when the sun was half-way between us and the planet, heading towards the closest point in its elliptical path.
The first video of eruption on the sun was captured by Solar Orbiter.
Ground control teams have been gradually increasing the altitude of the Solar Orbiter around the sun. At half the sun-Earth distance, the previous closest approaches took place farther away from the sun. Future perihelions will see Solar Orbiter dive even closer to the sun, up to 26 million miles away.
The Saturday close approach to the sun will allow the Solar Orbiter's ten instruments to take a new set of detailed images of the sun's atmosphere, as well as the solar wind emitted by the star.
Scientists want to see the data. Images taken during Solar Orbiter's first close approach to the sun in June 2020 revealed never before observed miniature solar flares nicknamed the campfires.
The campfires are cousins of the solar flares that we can observe from Earth, million or billion times smaller, according to David Berghmans, a space physicist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium.
Berghmans said that the sun has a lot more energy than is apparent when it is in a subdued period.
The activity of the sun has been picking up recently, promising an even livelier spectacle than the 2020 photo opportunity.
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