Sun's north pole, view constructed from PROBA-2 data. At centre is the polar coronal hole region, a source of fast solar wind. While the Sun's poles cannot be seen directly by this spacecraft, the atmosphere above the poles can be seen extending beyond the solar disc. This is used to infer the appearance of the polar regions. Over time, as the Sun rotates, small arrays of data can be combined to produces images like this. PROBA-2 is the ESA's Project for Onboard Autonomy-2. This image consists of data from PROBA-2's extreme-ultraviolet SWAP (Sun Watcher using Active Pixel System Detector and Image Processing) imager. ESA's Solar Orbiter (launching in 2020) will resume the imaging of the Sun's polar regions that last took place in 2009 with the end of the Ulysses mission. Image published in 2018.