Objective A
Five-day warning
Provide Europe with a validated forecast of geomagnetic conditions five days ahead, with an arrival-time error below four hours for fast coronal mass ejections.
Mission ISH-04
Mission
profile
Eighteen months of cruise to reach a point that trails Earth by 60 degrees, then seven years of continuous watch over the solar hemisphere that is about to rotate towards us.
Sequence
From Kourou
to station
Six phases, each with its own review board and its own way of going wrong.
2027-11-14
Launch
Ariane 62 from Kourou, dual manifest, injection into an Earth-escape trajectory 34 minutes after lift-off.
Complete
2027-11-15
Commissioning
Solar array deployment, attitude acquisition, first contact with Davos at 04:12 UTC and shield alignment to the Sun.
Complete
2028-03-11
Deep space manoeuvre
A 3.4 m/s correction shapes the drift orbit so that the observatory arrives at L5 with almost no capture cost.
Complete
2028-04-02
Instrument first light
Coronagraph door opened, magnetograph and spectrometer powered, radiometric calibration against the Davos reference.
In progress
2028-06-09
Halo orbit insertion
Station keeping begins around L5 with a budget of 2 m/s per year, enough for a fourteen-year extension.
Planned
2028-07-01
Routine science
Continuous observation and the daily five-day bulletin, distributed to eleven member states at 06:00 UTC.
Planned
2035-06-30
Nominal end of mission
Covering one full solar cycle from rise to decline. Propellant supports operations well beyond this date.
Planned
Objectives
What the mission
has to deliver
Four commitments written into the funding decision, each measurable and each reviewed annually.
Objective B
Stereoscopic corona
Combine the L5 view with near-Earth assets to reconstruct eruptions in three dimensions, continuously and without gaps.
Objective C
Far-side magnetography
Map the photospheric magnetic field of solar longitudes not yet visible from Earth, and publish the maps within one hour of downlink.
Objective D
Open data
Release all calibrated science products under an open licence, with no proprietary period for any instrument team.
Heritage
Ninety years
of measuring
the Sun
The institute has kept a solar radiometry record above Davos since 1938. SENTINELLE L5 carries the same reference standard into deep space, so the new measurements can be tied to the old ones without a break.
- Founded
- 1938
- Staff
- 94
- Partner institutes
- 6
- Member states
- 11