  Solar Orbiter is a joint ESA-NASA mission planed for launch in October 2018.
The science payload includes remote-sensing and in-situ instrumentation
designed with the primary goal of understanding how the Sun creates and
controls the heliosphere. The spacecraft will follow an elliptical orbit around
the Sun, with perihelion as close as 0.28 AU. During the late orbit phase the
orbital plane will reach inclinations above 30 degrees, allowing direct
observations of the solar polar regions. The Energetic Particle Detector (EPD)
is an instrument suite consisting of several sensors measuring electrons,
protons and ions over a broad energy interval (2 keV to 15 MeV for electrons, 3
keV to 100 MeV for protons and few tens of keV/nuc to 450 MeV/nuc for ions),
providing composition, spectra, timing and anisotropy information. We present
an overview of Solar Orbiter from the energetic particle perspective,
summarizing the capabilities of EPD and the opportunities that these new
observations will provide for understanding how energetic particles are
accelerated during solar eruptions and how they propagate through the
Heliosphere.
