I didn't even realize that we've never seen the sun's poles before as I just assumed we already scanned our star many times over.
A nice reminder of how patchy and limited our knowledge is despite the impression of the opposite.
Keep up the great work, humans!
Dambit. No hexagons. I think i might have lost an old bet.
‘World First’ is a poor choice of words. ‘First Ever’?
I love this, seems so minor if not paying attention but it's absolutely mind blowing. Getting a view we never saw of the life giver, an object that used to be revered as a god, nearly every human alive I history has basked in it's light and heat, and the for the first time we are seeing it in full
This allegation is incorrect.
The Ulysses spacecraft had already did that in 1994-1995.
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.