The mission, which is a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, launched in February and conducted a close pass of the sun in mid-June. All 10 of its instruments were switched on together for the first time during this pass to collect images and data.

The images were taken at a distance of 47,845,581 miles away from the sun. This close pass, which is called a perihelion, was within the orbits of the two closest planets to the sun, Venus and Mercury.

In the images, there are small solar flares called "campfires" that can be seen near the sun's surface.

"No images have been taken of the Sun at such a close distance before and the level of detail they provide is impressive," said David Long, co-principal investigator on the ESA Solar Orbiter Mission Extreme Ultraviolet Imager Investigation at University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory, in a statement.

"They show miniature flares across the surface of the Sun, which look like campfires that are millions of times smaller than the solar flares that we see from Earth," he said.

"Dotted across the surface, these small flares might play an important role in a mysterious phenomenon called coronal heating, whereby the Sun's outer layer, or corona, is more than 200 - 500 times hotter than the layers below," Long said.

"We are looking forward to investigating this further as Solar Orbiter gets closer to the Sun and our home star becomes more active."

The scientists don't yet know what exactly the campfires are, but they believe they could be "nanoflares," or tiny sparks that help heat the sun's outer atmosphere.

"The campfires we are talking about here are the little nephews of solar flares, at least a million, perhaps a billion times smaller," said David Berghmans, principal investigator of the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager and an astrophysicist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels. "When looking at the new high resolution EUI images, they are literally everywhere we look."

Measurements of the temperature of these campfires could provide more information, something that the orbiter's SPICE instrument, or Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment, can do.

In addition to images, data from the four instruments helping to measure the space environment around the orbiter was also shared.

"Already our data are revealing shockwaves, coronal mass ejections, phenomena called 'switchbacks' and fine-scale waves in the magnetic field that we are only able to see thanks to the extreme sensitivity of our instrument," said Tim Horbury, principal investigator of Solar Orbiter's magnetometer and professor at Imperial College London, in a statement.

Shortly after the mission launched in February, it was impacted by the shutdowns that occurred in response to the spread of coronavirus.

Mission control at the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany to close down completely for more than a week during a time when each instrument was to be tested.

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