Comment by superkuh
Comment by superkuh 2 days ago
This slightly tilted view of the poles is a teaser. I didn't know they'd managed to incorporate late in the mission gravity assists into the cheaper plan B to slightly tweak out of the ecliptic while dropping close to the sun. That's pretty cool. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Animatio...
But we could've had so much more. The original proposal A for the ESA Solar Orbiter was a highly inclined orbit relative to the ecliptic plane to truly get full polar views of the sun. But this was too expensive. So they went with the cheaper proposal B which was mostly just a spectroscopic platform. Similar to SDO AIA, except in a solar orbit (almost completely within the ecliptic plane) instead of SDO AIA's Earth based sun synchronous orbit.
They plan to get a more polar orbit each time they get close to Venus: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/01/Solar_Orbi...
Not sure if 33° angle in 2029 is the final "polarity" or if they'll keep tilting after that.