Aims. Solar Orbiter, the first mission of ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015–2025 programme and a mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, will explore the Sun and heliosphere from close up and out of the ecliptic plane. It was launched on 10 February 2020 04:03 UTC from Cape Canaveral and aims to address key questions of solar and heliospheric physics pertaining to how the Sun creates and controls the Heliosphere, and why solar activity changes with time. To answer these, the mission carries six remote-sensing instruments to observe the Sun and the solar corona, and four in-situ instruments to measure the solar wind, energetic particles, and electromagnetic fields. In this paper, we describe the science objectives of the mission, and how these will be addressed by the joint observations of the instruments onboard. Methods. The paper first summarises the mission-level science objectives, followed by an overview of the spacecraft and payload. We report the observables and performance figures of each instrument, as well as the trajectory design. This is followed by a summary of the science operations concept. The paper concludes with a more detailed description of the science objectives. Results. Solar Orbiter will combine in-situ measurements in the heliosphere with high-resolution remote-sensing observations of the Sun to address fundamental questions of solar and heliospheric physics. The performance of the Solar Orbiter payload meets the requirements derived from the mission’s science objectives. Its science return will be augmented further by coordinated observations with other space missions and ground-based observatories.

Abstract. At high spatial and temporal resolution, coronal loops are observed to have a highly dynamic nature. Recent observations with SOHO and TRACE frequently show localized brightenings "raining" down towards the solar surface. What is the origin of these features? Here we present for the first time a comparison of observed intensity enhancements from an EIT shutterless campaign with non-equilibrium ionization simulations of coronal loops in order to reveal the physical processes governing fast flows and localized brightenings. We show that catastrophic cooling around the loop apex as a consequence of footpoint-concentrated heating offers a simple explanation for these observations. An advantage of this model is that no external driving mechanism is necessary as the dynamics result entirely from the non-linear character of the problem.

Abstract. On 11 July 2001 an EIT shutterless campaign was conducted which provided 120 high-cadence (68 s) 304 Å images of the north eastern quarter of the Sun. The most interesting feature seen in the data is an off-limb half loop structure along which systematic intensity variations are seen which appear to propagate from the top of the loop towards its footpoint. We investigate the underlying cause of these propagating disturbances, i.e. whether they are caused by waves or by plasma flows. First we identify 7 blobs with the highest intensities and follow them along the loop. By means of a location-time plot, bulk velocities can be measured at several locations along the loop. The velocity curve found this way is then compared with characteristic wave speeds and with the free-fall speed in order to deduce the nature of the intensity variations. Additional information on density and temperature is derived by measuring the relative intensity enhancements and comparing the EIT 304 Å sequence with Big Bear data and 171 Å data (TRACE/EIT). The combination of all these constraints gives us an insight on the nature and origin of these intensity variations. The idea of slow magneto-acoustic waves is rejected, and we find several arguments supporting that these intensity variations are due to flowing/falling plasma blobs.

We report observations of quasi-periodic pulsations (QPPs) during the X2.2 flare of 15 February 2011, observed simultaneously in several wavebands. We focus on fluctuations on time scale 1-30 s and find different time lags between different wavebands. During the impulsive phase, the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) channels in the range 25-100 keV lead all the other channels. They are followed by the Nobeyama RadioPolarimeters at 9 and 17 GHz and the Extreme Ultra-Violet (EUV) channels of the Euv SpectroPhotometer (ESP) onboard the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO). The Zirconium and Aluminum filter channels of the Large Yield Radiometer (LYRA) onboard the Project for On-Board Autonomy (PROBA2) satellite and the SXR channel of ESP follow. The largest lags occur in observations from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES), where the channel at 1-8Å leads the 0.5-4Å channel by several seconds. The time lags between the first and last channels is up to ≈ 9 s. We identified at least two distinct time intervals during the flare impulsive phase, during which the QPPs were associated with two different sources in the Nobeyama RadioHeliograph at 17 GHz. The radio as well as the hard X-ray channels showed different lags during these two intervals. To our knowledge, this is the first time that time lags are reported between EUV and SXR fluctuations on these time scales. We discuss possible emission mechanisms and interpretations, including flare electron trapping.

We analyze light curves from the LYRA irradiance experiment on board PROBA2 during the flare of 2010 February 8. We see both long-and short-period oscillations during the flare. The long-period oscillation is interpreted in terms of standing slow sausage modes; the short-period oscillation is thought to be a standing fast sausage mode. The simultaneous presence of two oscillation modes in the same flaring structure allows for new coronal seismological applications. The periods are used to find seismological estimates of the plasma-β and the density contrast of the flaring loop. Also the wave mode number is estimated from the observed periods.

The Sun Watcher with Active Pixels and Image Processing (SWAP) is an EUV solar telescope on board ESA's Project for Onboard Autonomy 2 (PROBA2) mission launched on 2 November 2009. SWAP has a spectral bandpass centered on 17.4 nm and provides images of the low solar corona over a 54×54 arcmin field-of-view with 3.2 arcsec pixels and an imaging cadence of about two minutes. SWAP is designed to monitor all space-weather-relevant events and features in the low solar corona. Given the limited resources of the PROBA2 microsatellite, the SWAP telescope is designed with various innovative technologies, including an off-axis optical design and a CMOS-APS detector. This article provides reference documentation for users of the SWAP image data.

The Sun Watcher with Active Pixels and Image Processing (SWAP) EUV solar telescope on board the Project for On-Board Autonomy 2 (PROBA2) spacecraft has been regularly observing the solar corona in a bandpass near 17.4 nm since February 2010. With a field-of-view of 54×54 arcmin, SWAP provides the widest-field images of the EUV corona available from the perspective of the Earth.By carefully processing and combining multiple SWAP images it is possible to produce low-noise composites that reveal the structure of the EUV corona to relatively large heights. A particularly important step in this processing was to remove instrumental stray light from the images by determining and deconvolving SWAP's point spread function (PSF) from the observations. In this paper we use the resulting images to conduct the first-ever study of the evolution of the large-scale structure of the corona observed in the EUV over a three-year period that includes the complete rise phase of solar cycle 24. Of particular note is the persistence over many solar rotations of bright, diffuse features composed of open magnetic field that overlie polar crown filaments and extend to large heights above the solar surface. These features appear to be related to coronal fans, which have previously been observed in white-light coronagraph images and, at low heights, in the EUV. We also discuss the evolution of the corona at different heights above the solar surface and the evolution of the corona over the course of the solar cycle by hemisphere.

An EIT shutterless campaign was conducted on 11 July 2001 and provided 120 high-cadence (68 s) 30.4 nm images of the north-eastern quarter of the Sun. Systematic intensity variations are seen which appear to propagate along an off-disk loop-like structure. In this paper we study the nature of these intensity variations by confronting the EIT observations studied in De Groof et al. (2004Groof et al. ( , A&A, 415, 1141 with simultaneous Hα images from Big Bear Solar Observatory. With the goal to carefully co-register the two image sets, we introduce a technique designed to compare data of two different instruments. The image series are first co-aligned and later overplotted in order to visualize and compare the behaviour of the propagating disturbances in both data sets. Since the same intensity variations are seen in the EIT 30.4 nm and in the Hα images, we confirm the interpretation of De Groof et al. (2004Groof et al. ( , A&A, 415, 1141) that we are observing downflows of relatively cool plasma. The origin of the downflows is explained by numerical simulations of "catastrophic cooling" in a coronal loop which is heated predominantly at its footpoints.