Solar Orbiter: a mission to look at the sun

ECUSA-DC launches its NASA series 2020 with a talk by astrophysicist Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla about the Solar Orbiter mission.

Solar Orbiter is a space mission that will help us understand how our star creates and controls its changing atmosphere, the heliosphere. Knowing our star, the Sun, helps us to know better our universe but above all it helps us to protect better our aerospace technology and ensure the success of a space exploration in our solar system.

The Solar Orbiter mission is a collaboration between ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA to bring human technology to the vicinity of the Sun and to observe its poles for the first time with high-resolution telescopes. Solar Orbiter will launch on February 5 at 11:27 pm from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Spain has been one of the great contributors in this mission.

About Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla

Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla is a scientific researcher at NASA and attached scientist to the Solar Orbiter mission at the Goddard space flight center. She obtained her degree in Theoretical Physics from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and her PhD from the Universidad de Alcalá. She arrived at NASA in 2006 under the NASA postdoctoral program. Her scientific work focuses on the study of phenomena associated with the variability of our star and known as coronal mass emissions. These phenomena are spectacular explosions that occur in the Sun and cause variability in space weather and eventually geomagnetic activity.