Mercury's transit will help Solar Orbiter scientist to calibrate the spacecraft's instruments.
Mercury crossing in front of the sun's disk as seen by the Solar Orbiter's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager.
"It's not just looking at Mercury passing in front of the sun, but passing in front of the different layers of the [sun's] atmosphere," Miho Janvier, a space physicist at the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale in France and SPICE deputy project scientist, said in aFor Solar Orbiter, the transit of Mercury offered a valuable chance to calibrate the instruments.
Mercury can be seen as a small black dot passing toward the bottom of the sun's disk in this sequence of images captured by the Solar Orbiter's Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager.
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