Berghmans, David ; Rochus, Pierre ; Auchere, Frederic ; Harra, Louise ; Schmutz, Werner ; Schuhle, Udo

Talk presented at 2018 SDO Science Workshop, Ghent (Belgium) on 2018-10-31

Abstract: The ESA Solar Orbiter mission is designed to determine how the Sun creates and controls the heliosphere. The spacecraft will bring a combination of in situ and remote sensing instruments out of the ecliptic (>30°) and close to the sun (0.3 solar-radii). The launch of Solar Orbiter is expected (not earlier than) Feb 2019. The Extreme Ultraviolet Imager is part of the remote-sensing package of Solar Orbiter, to be operating during 3 ten-day periods of each orbit around the Sun, which last roughly half a year. These 3 periods will correspond to perihelion and maximal solar latitude north and south. The Extreme Ultraviolet Imager is itself a suite of three UV and EUV telescopes that observe the solar atmosphere both globally as well as at very high resolution. The two high-resolution imagers (HRIs) will image the solar atmosphere in the chromospheric Lyman alpha line and the coronal 17nm pass band with a resolution of 0.5 arcsec. From perihelion, this will correspond to a pixel footprint on the solar disc of (110km)^2 . The Full Sun Imager (FSI), working at the 17.4 nm and 30.4 nm EUV passbands, will provide a global view of the solar atmosphere and is therefore an essential building block for the “connection science” of the Solar Orbiter mission. The FSI field of view is large enough (228arcmin) that, even at perihelion and at maximal off-points by Solar Orbiter, the full solar disk remains in the field of view. This large FOV and the FSI’s high sensitivity will allow to image the “transition corona” where the topology of streamers and pseudo-streamers fades in the solar wind. Furthermore, FSI will be the first to image all this from out of the ecliptic. In this talk we will give an overview of the EUI instrument. We will focus on the novel aspects of EUI that will allow it to image beyond what previous EUV imagers could show us: EUV imaging from the highest solar latitude, with the widest field-of-view and at highest spatial resolution.

Keyword(s): Solar Orbiter
Funding: PRODEX /PRODEX /PRODEX