ESA Science & Technology - Announcement of Opportunity for the operations and scientific exploitation of the SPICE instrument on board the Solar Orbiter mission

Solar Orbiter is the first M-class mission of ESA's Cosmic Vision programme. The mission is devoted to solar and heliospheric physics and will provide unprecedented close-up and high-latitude observations of the Sun and inner heliosphere. The mission will be carried out as an ESA mission, in collaboration with NASA, open to the worldwide science community.

The science payload of Solar Orbiter comprises both remote-sensing and in situ instruments. The SPICE (Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment) instrument will perform extreme ultraviolet imaging spectroscopy to remotely characterize plasma properties of the Sun's on-disc corona. This will enable matching in-situ composition signatures of solar wind streams to their source regions on the Sun's surface.

This AO is intended to select the Consortium for the provision of the operations and scientific exploitation of the SPICE instrument. 

Full details of this AO, including all documentation and the submission forms, are on the dedicated web page at:

http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/call-for-spice-operations/home

AO schedule and deadlines