The RPW instrument, which measures electric and magnetic waves in the internal heliosphere, was designed and built by an international consortium led by a combined LESIA/CNES team. The result of more than ten years of work, RPW was launched with nine other instruments and telescopes in February 2020 on board the European probe Solar Orbiter towards the Sun.
After a journey of 21 months and nearly two billion km, the probe underwent a final gravitational assistance by the Earth on November 27, before beginning the nominal phase of its mission with a first passage at 0.3 astronomical units end of March 2022 (roughly the distance from Mercury when it is closest to the Sun).
The papers produced with the observations during the cruise phase cover a very wide range of scientific objectives. RPW thus made it possible to obtain the first observations of a type III solar radio emission with four different probes, including Solar Orbiter (Musset et al., see the figure below). These radio emissions are produced by energetic electrons injected into the heliosphere during solar flares.
The instrument also made it possible to study the rate of interplanetary dust along the orbit of the probe and to show that the population of dust studied is moving away from the Sun at a speed of around 50 km/s. RPW was also able to measure waves associated with the tail of Comet ATLAS, as well as the magnetosphere of Venus, both encountered during the Solar Orbiter’s journey around the Sun. These could be further investigated by combining data from RPW with data from the energetic particle detectors of the EPD instrument.
References
Link towards the special issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics :
https://www.aanda.org/component/toc/?task=topic&id=1340