ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/SoloHI team/NRL
One of the instruments aboard Solar Orbiter, a probe built by the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA, caught its first video of a coronal mass ejection while whizzing around the other side of the Sun in February. Solar Orbiter, which launched in early 2020, has detected these massive bursts of energy in the past, but the explosion captured in February this year was an exciting first for NASA.
NASA built the Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager, or the SoloHI instrument for the Solar Orbiter. It recently captured an energetic gust of solar plasma jetting from the star’s surface as the spacecraft was meandering around the Sun. Scientists didn’t expect the spacecraft to beam back any exciting images at this point — data is slow to reach…
