The Ulysses Mission

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The Ulysses Mission was originally proposed as a dual spacecraft mission to simultaneously explore the regions over the Sun's north and south poles. Funding problems reduced the mission to a single spacecraft set for launch in 1986. The Challenger disaster then pushed the actual launch by four years. The Ulysses spacecraft was launched from the Space Shuttle Discovery on October 6, 1990 on its mission over the Sun's south and north poles.

This ESA/NASA mission is designed to sample the solar wind and the heliosphere at latitudes unexplored by any other spacecraft. The Ulysses spacecraft carried a suite of instruments out to Jupiter where that planet's gravity pulled the spacecraft into a trajectory that carried it over the Sun's south pole in the fall of 1994 and its north pole in the summer of 1995. It will make its next pass over the Sun's south pole in the fall of 2000 and the north pole in the fall of 2001. These two orbital passes provide views of the solar wind at times near the minimum of solar activity and the maximum of solar activity.

Instruments onboard Ulysses measure particles, magnetic fields, and electro-magnetic radiation from radio wavelengths to gamma-rays. MSFC Solar Physics Branch member Steven Suess is a co-investigator on one of the solar wind experiments.

Web Links

Mission Details - The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Ulysses Mission webpage