Ulysses is to date, unique in its exploration of the high latitude heliosphere. The prohibitive difficulties involved in using launch vehicle propulsion to significantly depart from the ecliptic plane meant that Ulysses had to take advantage of Jupiter's massive gravitational field to sling shot into a high inclination orbit around the Sun. This gravitationally assisted maneuver provided Ulysses with a trajectory going out beyond the orbit of Jupiter and reaching heliographic latitudes of about 80 degrees.

The orbit itself has a period of about 6 years with a closest approach to the Sun of about 1.3 AU. Ulysses will have completed 2 complete orbits of the Sun by June, 2004 both of which are depicted in the images below and cover an entire solar activity cycle.