How to access Solar Orbiter data

Solar Orbiter is an ESA/NASA mission launched on 10 February 2020 to study the Sun and solar wind. Its highly elliptical orbit takes it as close as 0.28 AU. After a nearly two-year cruise phase, the remote sensing part of the science mission started in earnest with observations during the first close perihelion pass, running from 2 March to 5 April 2022. In situ science data are available starting from 2020, as well as some remote sensing commissioning data taken during the cruise phase. ESA’s European Space Astronomy Center (ESAC) outside Madrid, Spain, acts as the primary archive for Solar Orbiter. This Solar Orbiter Archive, known as SOAR, uses the standard Table Access Protocol recommended by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance. We will describe a number of tools that can be used to query and download data from the SOAR archive, including a dedicated website and the IDL SolarSoft library. These same data are also mirrored on a daily basis to the Solar Data Analysis Center (SDAC) at the Goddard Space Flight Center. From there, the in situ data can be accessed through the Coordinated Data Analysis Web (CDAWeb), while the remote sensing data are served from the Virtual Solar Observatory (VSO). Work is also underway to allow the VSO to directly connect to the Madrid SOAR archive via the TAP interface.