Apropos space missions studying the Sun's poles, here's a little something from 6 October 1990.
The deployment of the ESA/NASA Ulysses mission from space shuttle Discovery as part of STS-41.
The spacecraft is at top left of the IUS/PAM-S combo, which powered it towards Jupiter.
There it used a big gravity assist to get out of the ecliptic & orbit over the north & south poles of the Sun.
My slight reprocessing of this JPG scan of the film original: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/22587754