A European space probe will soon launch with the specific mission of doing exactly what every child learns never to do—stare directly at the sun.

The intensity of the sun’s light blinds most camera systems, whether they’re squishy eyes or rigid iPhones. But the newest solar satellite’s peepers aren’t most camera systems. Slated for launch in early February, the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter will tag team with NASA’s Parker Solar Probe to study the enigmatic solar winds and magnetic field of our nearest star. While it won’t get as scorchingly close as its partner in exploration, the Solar Orbiter will use its unique set of instruments to take unprecedented measurements of the star, including a much anticipated first glimpse of the sun’s poles—a perspective current solar observatories lack.

“[The spacecraft] do good work on their own, but when you put them together into this system observatory, they get so much more powerful,” said Nicky Fox, the director of NASA’s Heliophysics Science Division during a press conference on Monday. “We’re excited to welcome the Solar Orbiter into our fleet.”

After a few years of delays, the European Space Agency (ESA) has delivered its Solar Orbiter to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, where NASA is preparing it for launch as soon as February 7. Once in space, it will begin preliminary data collection in May, coordinating measurements with NASA’s Parker Solar Probe as that craft makes its fifth close approach to the sun. The 1.5-billion-dollar Solar Orbiter then faces a year-long journey—swinging around the sun, Venus, and the Earth to get into position—before it begins full science operations in November of 2021.

While the orbiter has a different skillset than Parker and is headed for a different solar region, both probes represent complementary attempts to unravel the same central mystery: a churning star sits at the center of our solar system, flinging outward gusts of charged particles that mess with our communications systems, but simultaneously keep us safe from the dangerous galactic rays of interstellar space. Heliophysicists know that the sun’s ever-shifting magnetic field plays a role in pushing out those particles, but can’t yet forecast when those protective breezes will get whipped up into damaging gales.

The Solar Orbiter will study the sun with two sets of instruments. The first is a suite of four so-called “in-situ” devices stuck onto a 12-foot rod that will directly gauge the zephyrs around it as one might do with a moistened finger stuck in the air. With the exception of one novel tool that can detect traces of heavy metals in the proton- and electron-based solar wind, this suite largely duplicates the senses of Parker. That redundancy will come as a boon to researchers, who will soon be able to compare the solar wind (which streams out from the sun in every direction) at two points relatively close to the sun. That’s a far cry from the number of weather stations meteorologists use on Earth, but a big improvement over just one.

The second set of instruments will increasingly set the orbiter apart as the mission evolves over the next seven years. Unlike Parker, it packs six remote sensing instruments—telescopes that will spy on the sun’s surface in everything from x-rays to visible light.

After this new orbiter opens its eyes in 2021, it will eventually take the closest images ever of the star, from just 26 million miles away. That’s about a quarter the distance between the Earth and the Sun, and inside the orbit of Mercury. Parker has already made closer approaches, but it doesn’t carry cameras capable of staring directly at the blazing orb—it’s focused on sampling the inner winds instead. The Solar Orbiter’s sun-facing telescopes sit safely inside the spacecraft, hidden behind its heatshield. When the time comes, viewing ports will open just enough to let in the sunlight needed to take pictures.

With both sets of instruments, researchers hope the Solar Orbiter will help them trace the solar wind back to its roots on the surface of the sun. “[It will] ideally provide, for the first time, the first full observation of the solar wind, starting by identifying its sources on the sun and then measuring all its properties as it flows outside throughout the atmosphere of the sun and as it reaches and passes our spacecraft,” said Yannis Zouganelis, the ESA deputy project scientist for Solar Orbiter.

Over time, the orbiter will leverage further encounters with Venus to tip its own orbit out of the plane that Earth and the other planets inhabit around the Sun’s equator. Reaching an orbit tipped at 33 degrees—which would bring it as high as northern Africa or Dallas, Texas if it were making a similar pass around Earth—it will snap the first pictures of the sun’s northern and southern poles. Here, simulations predict that dark, gaping holes (visible in ultraviolet light) expel tremendous amounts of wind. Current images taken from orbit around the equator catch just the edges of these unseen realms, which some scientists suspect may foretell the intensity of solar activity years down the line.

The unique perspective will also help researchers get a full, three-dimensional picture of the magnetic field at the poles and elsewhere. Other observatories have been able to gauge the field strength and estimate which way it’s pointing, but trying to do so while stuck on Earth is kind of like estimating depth with one eye closed. “Our models of solar winds and coronal mass ejections, they overlap critically on getting the magnetic field correct back at the sun,” said Chris Cyr, former NASA project scientist for the mission. “We’ve been making a lot of assumptions so far and this will give us a chance to check on that.”

The solar wind mystery has stood for decades, but with Solar Orbiter and the Parker Solar Probe on the case, some answers may finally be on the horizon. “It’s kind of a golden age for solar physics,” Fox said. “We’ve had to wait a long time for the technology to be ready.”

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On November 6, 2017 two storms lashed the Caribbean simultaneously. Hurricane Irma, feeding on the energy of warm seas, unleashed 185 mile-per-hour winds on the inhabitants of St. Martin, Barbuda, and other islands. Meanwhile, a hundred million miles away, a second excess of energy snapped part of the sun’s twisted magnetic field, causing a solar flare that flung x-rays and ultraviolet light toward Earth. At the height of the terrestrial tempest, the solar storm knocked out local emergency channels for about eight hours.

But while meteorologists had known Irma’s path for some time, the intense solar flare—the most powerful of the decade—came largely as a surprise. Researchers understand pretty well how the Earth’s atmosphere interacts with its surface to make rain, wind, and snow, but figuring out exactly how our local star generates “space weather” remains a big challenge. “On Earth they have this huge network of weather monitoring stations,” says Dan Seaton, a solar researcher at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “But on the sun we have some photos, a few extrapolations, and then there’s a lot of guesswork.”

The still under-construction Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST), which released its first images and movies of the sun’s roiling surface on Wednesday, represents one major effort to narrow that gap. Its 13-foot mirror—three times wider than any other solar telescope—can already spot features no other instrument can. In the near future, the $344 million facility, which sits on Haleakala volcano in Hawaii, will also gauge the twists and turns of the invisible but fierce force that drives space weather: magnetism.

DKIST will help researchers “understand how the magnetic fields behave,” says Gianna Cauzzi, an astronomer at the National Solar Observatory, which manages DKIST. That’s key, she says, for “understanding when certain configurations can go off and why. That will give you a hint [that] there might be something coming.” Knowing that radio channels are more likely to go down, operators could arrange other forms of communication or at least warn others they expect to go silent.

The sun may seem like an unvarying yellow orb from afar, but a zoomed in view reveals a seething mass of swirling currents and rising blobs—more boiling water balloon than shining bauble. Physicists more or less understand how the star’s fusion furnace heats bubbles and sends them up to spill open on the surface, as well as how the wispy atmosphere streams outward. But how does the first lead to the second? The next stage in solar physics, Seaton says, will be to sew these two, largely incompatible pictures together with other models describing the solar wind and the Earth’s magnetic field into one large quilted theory covering the whole system.

And that’s where DKIST comes in. It has the keen vision needed to snap images of the sun in detail previously hinted at only in computer simulations. With its first footage, which researchers have not yet processed for scientific use, the telescope captured a field of Texas-sized boils breaking on the surface. No one knew exactly what these bubbling cells would look like, but to the naked eye the theorists appear to have gotten them mostly right. “I was blown away at how similar they looked to what the models are predicting,” says Courtney Peck, a solar scientist at the University of Boulder, “so I think we’re making a big step forward.”

On top of its massive mirror, the instrument gets additional power from its unique design. All telescopes focus the light they collect into a point to resolve an image, and for DKIST that point actually lies outside of the mirror itself. This configuration keeps all of the supporting optical machinery (such as a formidable cooling apparatus) away from the mirror, where it could otherwise block and scatter incoming light. “We hope it will be revolutionary,” Cauzzi says.

The strategy seems to have paid off. While construction won’t officially end until the summer, Wednesday’s images have already hit the best possible resolution for this wavelength of red light—capturing features 18 miles across. “This is a major accomplishment, as it means that both the telescope and all of the optics downstream do work as expected,” Cauzzi says.

That sharp focus is key to solving the star’s enigmas. Model builders, who try to recreate the behavior of huge phenomena like solar flares in computer simulations, are hungry for the precise data that DKIST promises to deliver. Such predictions change drastically when they vary tiny, impossible-to-see features on the surface, which they currently have to guess at. Together with novel perspectives from an upcoming European spacecraft, Seaton expects that future solar models will benefit from “a lot fewer assumptions and a lot more reality.”

And Wednesday’s images are just the beginning. By the time it becomes fully operational next year, the telescope will feature a total of five instruments capable of collecting colors in both the visible and near infrared parts of the spectrum.

Crucially, those instruments will also be able to resolve the invisible magnetic field lines that thread through the sun’s various layers, because their magnetic influence orients and filters light in recognizable ways. Solar physicists are especially curious to turn DKIST toward the corona, an atmospheric layer 10,000 times dimmer (but paradoxically much, much hotter) than the star’s surface. Eruptions punch through the corona en route to Earth (where they can cause electrical blackouts days later), so the magnetic field there is a crucial and still misunderstood piece of the space weather puzzle. “This is something we don’t have,” Cauzzi says.

Weather of all kinds is inherently chaotic, and just as winter storm forecasts still struggle to get the snowfall right, space forecasters may never be able to predict the exact time and intensity of a communications-disrupting solar flare like the type that hit the Caribbean three years ago. Nevertheless, Seaton suggests that more unified solar theories will help researchers better recognize when the magnetic field is primed to explode, and that DKIST’s unique abilities will contribute to various solar physics advances.

“Any time we have looked at the sun in a novel way, we have been instantly surprised by what we saw,” he says. “And it’s those things nobody expected to see that are going to lead to breakthroughs in deep understanding of how the system actually works.”

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