ESA's Solar Orbiter deep-space probe has made history, returning the first-ever images of the Sun's south pole.
The Solar Orbiter project, a collaboration between the European Space Agency and NASA, has begun a critical new stage of the mission after the probe's first close encounter with the Sun.
A NASA-supplied Atlas 5 rocket launched the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft 9 February, kicking off an innovative mission to study the Sun in unprecedented detail, complementing close-in observations by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe.
