Preparing for the Solar Orbiter Mission: Studies of the Links between the Sun and the Solar Wind Charged Particle Populations

UCL/MSSL is both the Principal Investigator (PI) Institute on an international consortium providing the Solar Wind Analyser suite (SWA) of instruments and co-PI Institute and science lead on the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) for the ESA Solar Orbiter mission. The mission will likely be launched in Feb 2020. SWA will sample electron, proton, alpha particle and heavy ion populations at various distances down to 0.28 AU from the Sun (i.e. around a quarter the distance from the Sun to the Earth). In particular, UCL/MSSL has designed and built the electron analyser system (EAS) for the SWA suite. EUI consists of a suite of imaging telescopes to observe the solar atmosphere. EUI will allow us, on one hand, to determine the global structure of the solar corona and, on the other hand, to provide a crucial understanding of fine scale processes in the dynamic solar atmosphere. Images taken by the Full Sun Imager (FSI) of the EUI suite will offer the indispensable link between the solar surface and the outer corona, which ultimately shapes the characteristics of the interplanetary medium to be sampled in situ by Solar Orbiter.