An artist's concept of the Ulysses spacecraft. Credit: ESA.

Ulysses has flown over the sun's poles three times before in 1994-95, 2000-01 and 2007. Each flyby revealed something interesting and mysterious, but this one may be most interesting of all.

"Just as Earth's poles are crucial to studies of terrestrial climate change, the sun's poles may be crucial to studies of the solar cycle," explains Ed Smith, Ulysses project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Many researchers believe the sun's poles are central to the ebb and flow of the solar cycle. Consider the following: When sunspots break up, their decaying magnetic fields are carried toward the poles by vast currents of plasma. This makes the poles a sort of "graveyard for sunspots." Old magnetic fields sink beneath the polar surface two hundred thousand kilometers deep, all the way down to the sun's inner magnetic dynamo. There, dynamo action amplifies the fields for use in future solar cycles.

One big puzzle revealed by previous flybys is the temperature of the sun's poles. In the previous solar cycle, the magnetic north pole was about 80,000 degrees or 8% cooler than the south. Why should there be a difference? No one knows.

The current flyby may help solve the puzzle because it comes less than a year after a similar South Pole flyby in Feb. 2007. Mission scientists will be able to compare temperature measurements, north vs. south, with hardly any gap between them.

Ulysses also discovered the sun's high-speed polar wind. "At the sun's poles, the magnetic field opens up and allows solar atmosphere to stream out at a million miles per hour," says Smith.