The spacecraft provides a stable platform to accommodate the combination of remote-sensing and in situ instrumentation in an electromagnetically clean environment.

The 21 sensors were configured on the spacecraft to allow each to conduct its in situ or remote-sensing experiments with both access to and protection from the solar environment.

A battery pack provides supplementary power at other points in the mission such as eclipse periods encountered during planetary flybys.

The High-Temperature High-Gain Antenna needs to point to a wide range of positions to achieve a link with the ground station and to be able to downlink sufficient volumes of data.

Additional eight-hour downlink passes are scheduled as needed to reach the required total science data return of the mission.

The Solar Orbiter ground segment makes maximum reuse of ESA's infrastructure for Deep Space missions: The Science Operations Centre was responsible for mission planning and the generation of payload operations requests to the MOC, as well as science data archiving.

The handover of payload operations from the MOC to the SOC is performed at the end of the Near-Earth Commissioning Phase (NECP).

For example, after the 2025 Venus encounter, it will make its first solar pass at 17° inclination, increasing to 33° during a proposed mission extension phase, bringing even more of the polar regions into direct view.

Over the expected mission duration of 7 years, it will use additional gravity assists from Venus to raise its inclination from 0° to 24°, allowing it a better view of the Sun's poles.

[1][24] During its cruise phase to Venus, Solar Orbiter passed through the ion tail of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) from 31 May to 1 June 2020.

SolO observed the Sun, while PSP sampled the plasma of the solar wind, allowing scientists to compare data from both probes.

[45] Solar Orbiter news are regularly updated and listed in the official ESA public pages, as well as on the Twitter/X account .