Göttingen 2025 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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EP: Fachverband Extraterrestrische Physik

EP 4: Sun and Heliosphere II

EP 4.1: Hauptvortrag

Dienstag, 1. April 2025, 13:45–14:15, ZHG101

The Solar Orbiter Mission and the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager instrument: new opportunities for novel science — •Gherardo Valori — Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS), Göttingen, Germany

Solar Orbiter is a joint ESA-NASA mission that was launched in 2020 on a strongly eccentric orbit around the Sun, with closest perihelia at 0.28 AU. The Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager is the vector magnetohraph onboard Solar Orbiter (SO/PHI), and it is composed of the Full-Disc Telescope (FDT) images the entire solar disk, while the High-Resolution Telescope (HRT) observes a smaller part of the solar disk at high resolution.

With an orbit of about six months around the Sun, SO/PHI is the first magnetograpgh providing maps of the photospheric vector magnetic field from viewpoints away from the Sun-Earth line, including from the far side of the Sun. This opens new science opportunities and novel boundary conditions for data-driven and data-inspired numerical simulations, such as following active regions for much longer periods of time, faster synoptic maps, and the stereoscopic resolution of the 180-degree ambiguity.

Starting from spring 2025, SO started to raise significantly above the ecliptic, providing full spectropolarimetric observations of the solar poles for the first time, which will be crucial for the quantitative constraint of the magnetic field in heliospheric models. Finally, SO/PHI is also the forerunner of the Photospheric Magnetic-field Imager (PMI) onboard the forthcoming L5 mission Vigil.

Keywords: Photosphere; Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager; Polarimetry; Instrumentation; Solar Orbiter