Solar Orbiter can look further into the sun's atmosphere thanks to a camera "hack"

Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA. Its Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) returns high-resolution images of the structures in the Sun’s atmosphere, especially the corona. During EUI’s construction, a last-minute modification to the safety door on the front of the instrument has allowed it to see deeper into its target region than originally specified.

“It was really a hack,” says Frédéric Auchère, Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale, Université Paris-Sud, and a member of the EUI team. “I had the idea to just do it and see if it would work. It is actually a very simple modification to the instrument.” It involved adding a small, protruding ‘thumb’, weighing a few grams, to the door of the instrument.

As the door slides out of the way to let the light into the camera, if it is stopped halfway, the thumb covers the Sun’s bright disc, and EUI can detect the million-times fainter ultraviolet light coming from the surrounding corona. The team refer to this as the occulter mode of operation. Tests with the EUI occulter have been on-going since 2021.

In the past, images of the Sun’s corona have been taken with dedicated instruments called coronagraphs. For example, Solar Orbiter’s coronagraph is called Metis. The value of this new approach is that the coronagraph and the camera can be included in the same instrument. “We’ve shown that this works so well that you can now consider a new type of instrument that can do both imaging of the Sun and the corona around it,” says Daniel Müller, ESA’s Project Scientist for Solar Orbiter.

Even before those new instruments, there is a lot of new science to come from EUI. The occulter mode makes it possible for scientists to see deeper into the Sun’s atmosphere. This is the region that lies beyond the field of view of classical EUV imagers but it is usually obscured by traditional coronagraphs. Now, however, EUI’s occulter can image this little-explored region easily.

“Physics is changing there, the magnetic structures are changing there, and we never really had a good look at it before. There must be some secrets in there that we can now find,” says David Berghmans, Royal Observatory of Belgium, and the EUI Principal Investigator.

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Credits : European Space Agency