Explanation:

Recently, the Solar Orbiter, a collaborative mission between the European Space Agency and NASA to study the Sun, took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. 
The Solar Orbiter

• The mission, which will take the first pictures of the top and bottom of the sun, was launched on an Atlas V rocket. It is worth approximately Rs 11,700 crore.
• It carries four in situ instruments - which measure the space environment immediately around the spacecraft like the sense of touch.
• It also carries six remote-sensing imagers - which see the sun from afar.
• The Orbiter will take pictures using telescopes through a heat shield that is partly made of baked animal bones, to help it withstand temperatures of up to 600 degree Celsius.
• The Solar Orbiter (called SolO) will face the sun at approximately 42 million kilometres from its surface.

How is it different?

• Before SolO, all solar imaging instruments have been within the ecliptic plane, in which all planets orbit and which is aligned with the sun’s equator. 
• The new spacecraft will use the gravity of Venus and Earth to swing itself out of the ecliptic plane, passing inside the orbit of Mercury, and will be able to get a bird’s eye view of the sun’s poles for the first time.
• In 1990, NASA and ESA had sent the Ulysses mission, which also passed over the sun’s poles but at much farther distances, and did not carry a camera.