Globe 24/04: Journey into space
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75 million kilometres: That’s how close ESA’s Solar Orbiter was to the Sun when it took this image in 2022. Captured at a resolution of more than 83 million pixels, it shows our star in unprecedented detail. The outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere, the corona, reaches a temperature of around 1 million degrees Celsius – and no spacecraft has ever ventured so close as the Solar Orbiter. Over the course of two decades, ETH physics professor Louise Harra was involved in every phase of the project. (Image: ESA & NASA / Solar Orbiter / EUI team; data processing: E. Kraaikamp (ROB))
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