Thanks to its newly tilted orbit around the Sun, the European Space Agency-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft is the first to image the Sun’s poles from outside the ecliptic plane. Solar Orbiter’s unique viewing angle will change our understanding of the Sun’s magnetic field, the solar cycle and the workings of space weather.
Any image you have ever seen of the Sun was taken from around the Sun’s equator. This is because Earth, the other planets, and all other modern spacecraft orbit the Sun within a flat disc around the Sun called the ecliptic plane. By tilting its orbit out of this plane, Solar Orbiter reveals the Sun from a whole new angle.
The video titled ‘EUI video SolarOrbiter Sun south pole’ compares Solar Orbiter’s view (in yellow) with the one from Earth (grey), on 23 March 2025. At the time, Solar Orbiter was viewing the Sun from an angle of 17° below the solar equator, enough to directly see the Sun’s south pole. Over the coming years, the spacecraft will tilt its orbit even further, so the best views are yet to come.
“Today we reveal humankind’s first-ever views of the Sun’s pole” says Prof. Carole Mundell, ESA’s Director of Science. “The Sun is our nearest star, giver of life and potential disruptor of modern space and ground power systems, so it is imperative that we understand how it works and learn to predict its behaviour. These new unique views from our Solar Orbiter mission are the beginning of a new era of solar science.”
All eyes on the Sun’s south pole
A collage shows the Sun’s south pole as recorded on March 16-17, 2025, when Solar Orbiter was viewing the Sun from an angle of 15° below the solar equator. This was the mission’s first high-angle observation campaign, a few days before reaching its current maximum viewing angle of 17°.
The images shown in the collage were taken by three of Solar Orbiter’s scientific instruments: the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI), the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), and the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument. Click on the image to zoom in and see video versions of the data.
“We didn’t know what exactly to expect from these first observations – the Sun’s poles are literally terra incognita,” says Prof. Sami Solanki, who leads the PHI instrument team from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany.
The instruments each observe the Sun in a different way. PHI images the Sun in visible light (top left of the collage) and maps the Sun’s surface magnetic field (top centre). EUI images the Sun in ultraviolet light (top right), revealing the million-degree charged gas in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona. The SPICE instrument (bottom row) captures light coming from different temperatures of charged gas above the Sun’s surface, thereby revealing different layers of the Sun’s atmosphere.
By comparing and analysing the complementary observations made by these three imaging instruments, we can learn about how material moves in the Sun’s outer layers. This may reveal unexpected patterns, such as polar vortices (swirling gas) similar to those seen around the poles of Venus and Saturn.
These groundbreaking new observations are also key to understanding the Sun’s magnetic field and why it flips roughly every 11 years, coinciding with a peak in solar activity. Current models and predictions of the 11-year solar cycle fall short of being able to predict exactly when and how powerfully the Sun will reach its most active state.
Messy magnetism at solar maximum
One of the first scientific findings from Solar Orbiter’s polar observations is the discovery that at the south pole, the Sun’s magnetic field is currently a mess. While a normal magnet has a clear north and south pole, the PHI instrument’s magnetic field measurements show that both north and south polarity magnetic fields are present at the Sun’s south pole.
This happens only for a short time during each solar cycle, at solar maximum, when the Sun’s magnetic field flips and is at its most active. After the field flip, a single polarity should slowly build up and take over the Sun’s poles. In 5-6 years from now, the Sun will reach its next solar minimum, during which its magnetic field is at its most orderly and the Sun displays its lowest levels of activity.
“How exactly this build-up occurs is still not fully understood, so Solar Orbiter has reached high latitudes at just the right time to follow the whole process from its unique and advantageous perspective,” notes Sami.
PHI’s view of the full Sun’s magnetic field puts these measurements in context (see ‘PHI_south-pole-Bmap’ and ‘PHI_global-Bmap_20250211-20250429’). The darker the colour (red/blue), the stronger the magnetic field is along the line of sight from Solar Orbiter to the Sun.
The strongest magnetic fields are found in two bands either side of the Sun’s equator. The dark red and dark blue regions highlight active regions, where magnetic field gets concentrated in sunspots on the Sun’s surface (photosphere).
Meanwhile, both the Sun’s south and north poles are speckled with red and blue patches. This demonstrates that at small scales, the Sun’s magnetic field has a complex and ever-changing structure.
SPICE measures movement for the first time
Another interesting ‘first’ for Solar Orbiter comes from the SPICE instrument. Being an imaging spectrograph, SPICE measures the light (spectral lines) sent out by specific chemical elements – among which hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, neon and magnesium – at known temperatures. For the last five years, SPICE has used this to reveal what happens in different layers above the Sun’s surface.
Now for the first time, the SPICE team has also managed to use precise tracking of spectral lines to measure how fast clumps of solar material are moving. This is known as a ‘Doppler measurement’, named after the same effect that makes passing ambulance sirens change pitch as they drive by.
The resulting velocity map reveals how solar material moves within a specific layer of the Sun. By comparing the SPICE doppler and intensity maps, you can directly compare the location and movement of particles (carbon ions) in a thin layer called the ‘transition region’, where the Sun’s temperature rapidly increases from 10 000 °C to hundreds of thousands of degrees.
The SPICE intensity map reveals the locations of clumps of carbon ions. The SPICE doppler map includes the blue and red colours to indicate how fast the carbon ions are moving towards and away from the Solar Orbiter spacecraft, respectively. Darker blue and red patches are related to material flowing faster due to small plumes or jets.
Crucially, Doppler measurements can reveal how particles are flung out from the Sun in the form of solar wind. Uncovering how the Sun produces solar wind is one of Solar Orbiter’s key scientific goals.
“Doppler measurements of solar wind setting off from the Sun by current and past space missions have been hampered by the grazing view of the solar poles. Measurements from high latitudes, now possible with Solar Orbiter, will be a revolution in solar physics,” says SPICE team leader, Frédéric Auchère from the University of Paris-Saclay (France).
The best is yet to come
These are just the first observations made by Solar Orbiter from its newly inclined orbit, and much of this first set of data still awaits further analysis. The complete dataset of Solar Orbiter’s first full ‘pole-to-pole’ flight past the Sun is expected to arrive on Earth by October 2025. All ten of Solar Orbiter’s scientific instruments will collect unprecedented data in the years to come.
“This is just the first step of Solar Orbiter’s ‘stairway to heaven’: in the coming years, the spacecraft will climb further out of the ecliptic plane for ever better views of the Sun’s polar regions. These data will transform our understanding of the Sun’s magnetic field, the solar wind, and solar activity,” notes Daniel Müller, ESA’s Solar Orbiter project scientist.
Notes for editors
Solar Orbiter is the most complex scientific laboratory ever to study our life-giving star, taking images of the Sun from closer than any spacecraft before and being the first to look at its polar regions.
In February 2025, Solar Orbiter officially began the ‘high latitude’ part of its journey around the Sun by tilting its orbit to an angle of 17° with respect to the Sun’s equator. In contrast, the planets and all other Sun-observing spacecraft orbit in the ecliptic plane, tilted at most 7° from the solar equator.
The only exception to this is the ESA/NASA Ulysses mission (1990-2009), which flew over the Sun’s poles but did not carry any imaging instruments. Solar Orbiter’s observations will complement Ulysses’ by observing the poles for the first time with telescopes, in addition to a full suite of in-situ sensors, while flying much closer to the Sun. Additionally, Solar Orbiter will monitor changes at the poles throughout the solar cycle.
Solar Orbiter will continue to orbit around the Sun at this tilt angle until 24 December 2026, when its next flight past Venus will tilt its orbit to 24°. From 10 June 2029, the spacecraft will orbit the Sun at an angle of 33°. (Overview of Solar Orbiter’s journey around the Sun.)
Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA. Solar Orbiter’s Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) instrument is led by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS), Germany. The Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument is led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB). The Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument is a European-led facility instrument, led by the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS) in Paris, France.
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