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Ulysses

Ulysses

The Ulysses spacecraft was designed as a five-year mission to study the never-before-examined north and south poles of the Sun.

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Mission Statistics

Launch Date

Oct 06, 1990

Type

Orbiter

Target

Sun

Status

Past

About the mission

The Ulysses spacecraft was designed as a five-year mission to study the never-before-examined north and south poles of the Sun. Far outliving its planned mission lifetime by 13 years and collecting treasure troves of data on solar wind, interstellar dust and the three-dimensional character of solar radiation, Ulysses became one of the most prolific contributors to knowledge of the solar activity cycle.

The spacecraft also performed a number of technical feats including making an unprecedented gravity assist maneuver at Jupiter to hurl itself out of the elliptic plane and into its solar polar orbit.

Instruments

  • Solar Wind Ion Composition Spectrometer (GLG/SWICS)
  • Solar wind ion analyzer
  • Electrostatic analyzer
  • Cosmic dust detector
› Mission Website
› Ulysses Information on Solar System Exploration
› Ulysses Information on National Space Science Data Center

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