Tuesday

The Solar Orbiter mission, launched in February 2020, will start its nominal phase in 2022. This is timely, as we are assisting to the rising of the solar cycle with the associated increase of the number of erupting events. One of the main goals of Solar Orbiter is indeed to understand the origin of Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), and to understand how they interact with the heliosphere.
Coronal Mass Ejections are now studies since several decades, but given the mission profile of Solar Orbiter, we will be able to tackle the CMEs still open questions from a different prospective. The close distances, never reached before by remote sensing instruments and the out of ecliptic orbits, will provide unprecedented data. The close solar distance reached by the satellite will allow in-situ instruments to collect information on the CME propagation before their interaction with the ambient heliosphere modifies too much their original properties. In this talk we will present these and other aspects of mission to show the Solar Orbiter observational possibilities for studying CMEs.