Spacecraft · tracked live
Ulysses
Went to Jupiter in order to leave the plane of the planets: the flyby threw it into an orbit over the Sun's poles, the only spacecraft ever to fly there. It found the solar wind blowing fast and steady from the poles and slow and gusty from the equator, over most of a solar cycle, and was switched off in 2009 when its fuel lines began to freeze.
- Agency
- ESA/NASA
- Launched
- 1990-10-06 - 2009-06-30
- From the Sun
- 261,359,824 km (+882,961 km/d)
- From the Earth
- 229,808,425 km (+2,125,301 km/d)
- A signal takes
- 13 min
- Travelling at
- 27.5 km/s
Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of the date below, changing at the rate beside each.
Path
A loop round the Sun almost perpendicular to the plane of the planets, 1.3 to 5.4 AU and six years round. Jupiter threw it there in 1992, and nothing has flown over the Sun's poles since.
Along the way
- Jupiter flyby, thrown out of the plane of the planets
- First pass over the Sun's south pole
- First pass over the Sun's north pole
- Switched off, with the fuel lines beginning to freeze
Everything the map shows is worked out in your browser from published orbital data - nothing on it is a stored picture of where things were.