Sorry, I just get all cranked up over this.  Ulysses is a 16 year old spacecraft that is jointly managed by ESA and NASA and very capably built in Europe I might add.  Instead of just an orbit in the plane of the planets this spacecraft is orbiting so that it only crosses the plane of planetary orbit and does that in sort of a perpendicular fashion — see below.

It so happens that Ulysses has reached maximum latitude yesterday and was looking directly up at the Sun’s south pole at a distance of 329 million km or 204 million miles.

Science@NASA has some fun facts and more on the story.

Here is the Ulysses website from JPL.

Image Credit: Science@NASA