ESA's Solar Orbiter mission will be an important element in the International Living With A Star programme. As presently envisaged, however, it will not be a real-time mission. Thermal constraints on the deployment of the high-gain antenna prevent high-rate data transmission during perihelion passages; near-Sun data will be stored and downlinked at a later time. The role of Solar Orbiter in operational, day-to-day space weather forecasting may therefore be limited. Nevertheless, as outlined above, the mission will make major contributions to our understanding of a wide variety of space weather phenomena, leading in turn to better predictive models.
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