SolOHI Imager Captures Rare Shot of Venus, Earth, Mars, and Uranus

The Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI) camera on board ESA/NASA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft captured four Solar System planets. This screen shot from the video shows Venus, the brightest object in the video, roughly 30 million miles (48 million kilometers) from Solar Orbiter. The distance to Earth was 156 million miles (251 million kilometers) and 206 million miles (332 million kilometers) to Mars on that day. Uranus was confirmed later at 1.7 billion miles (2.7 billion kilometers) from the orbiter. The Sun is located on the right, outside the video frame. Launched in February 2020, Solar Orbiter is the most complex scientific laboratory ever to have been built to study the Sun, taking images closer than any spacecraft before. SoloHI is one of the six remote-sensing instruments that will take images of the solar wind by capturing the light scattered by electrons in the wind.