Solar Orbiter ( ESA , Nasa ), Parker Solar Probe (Nasa) and Stereo - for Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory - (Nasa). These are three ongoing mission for us to learn about our star , the sun.
(The Solar Orbiter probe observing the Sun. © ESA, NASA)
But today, NASA unveils images of our solar system that they returned over the year 2020. Each from its own orbit, with different perspectives. Our close environment as we have never seen it before.
First, this image of Solar Orbiter , when the mission was some 250 million kilometers from Earth, on November 18, 2020. We discover, in the same field: Venus , Earth and Mars.
We owe this image to the Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager, which aims the side of our star to capture the solar wind and dust that fills the space between the planets. © ESA, Nasa, NRL, Solar Orbiter, SolOHI
Then, the almost complete spectacle of our Solar System - Mercury , Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - immortalized by Parker Solar Probe , on June 7, when it was 158 million kilometers from our Earth and less than 19 million kilometers from the Sun.
These two images were obtained by the Wide-field Imager from Parker Solar Probe (Wispr). Its objective: to capture the solar corona and the inner heliosphere as well as the solar wind and other structures. © NASA, Johns Hopkins APL, Naval Research Laboratory, Guillermo Stenborg and Brendan Gallagher
Stereo, finally, captured the same planets in our Solar System on June 7, 2020, too. But from a different position than Parker Solar Probe.
This image is from one of Stereo's heliospheric imagers. It targets the outer atmosphere of the Sun, the corona and the solar wind. The dark columns in the image are related to the saturation of the instrument's detector, caused by the luminosity of the planets combined with the long exposure time. © Nasa, STEREO, HI