Sometime in 2020, the Solar Orbiter satellite will begin its several-year journey after being launched from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida with an Atlas V rocket. The satellite will travel through space for 3.5 years before reaching its destination point about 42 million kilometers from the Sun—the furthest any spacecraft has ever traveled.
Once there, the satellite will continually orbit the giant star. Ten on-board measuring instruments will gather data about the Sun’s heliosphere, polar regions and the side not visible from the Earth, as well as provide images at an extraordinary resolution (with each pixel representing 70 kilometers of the Sun’s surface). Engineers at the European Space Agency (which is funding the mission) hope to use this data to determine the cause of solar wind, which is the continuous streaming of particles from the Sun.