North Pole flyby Options

[Canopus]

NORTH POLE FLYBY: This week, at a pivotal moment in the solar cycle, the ESA/NASA Ulysses spacecraft is flying over the sun's North Pole. The sun's polar regions are central to the ebb and flow of solar cycles, so this is a good time to visit.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/14jan_northpole.htm

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.

[Gsnorgathon]

Snagged from the Mercury flyby thread:

Looks like Ulysses could be troubleshooting for several days. This from the Operations Summary:
15 January EPC 1/TWTA 1 Switch off/on Test 1 - 015.01:18 ERT.
Operational test to validate future mode of operations.
Failure to re-acquire X-band downlink at the expected time.
Commands to switch EPC/TWTA 1 repeated without success.
S/C now configured to S-band downlink.
16 January TBD
17 January TBD
18 January PPSP configuration change - GRU ON - 018.hh:mm SCET.
It's at http://ulysses-ops.jpl.esa.int/ulsfct/opssumm.html