Cabo Cañaveral – A couple of European satellites have created the first artificial solar eclipses flying in a precise and elegant training, providing hours of totality to the letter for scientists.
The European Space Agency published the photos of the Eclipse on Monday at the Paris Aeronautics Hall. Run at the end of last year, the orbital duo has produced simulated solar eclipses since March while moving to tens of thousands of kilometers above the earth.
Flying 150 meters away, A satellite blocks the sun as the moon does during a total natural solar eclipse, while The other points his telescope to the crown, The outer atmosphere of the sun that forms a crown or halo of light.
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It is an intricate and prolonged dance which requires extreme precision by the spacecraft in the form of a cube, less than 1.5 meters in size. Its flight precision must be within a mere millimeter, the thickness of a nail. This meticulous positioning is achieved autonomously through GPS navigation, stars trackers, lasers and radio links.
Called PROBA-3the mission of $ 210 million has generated 10 successful solar eclipses so far during the ongoing check phase.
“The longest eclipse lasted five hours”said Andrei Zhukov, From the Royal Observatory of Belgium, the main scientist of the Orbital Observation Telescope of the Crown. He and his team aspire to wonderful six hours of totality by eclipse once the scientific observations begin.
“Scientists are already excited about the preliminary results that show the crown without the need for any special image processing.”said Zhukov.
“We could hardly believe what we saw”Said Zhukov in an email. “This was the first attempt, and it worked. It was so incredible.”.
Zhukov anticipates an average of two solar eclipses per week, which represents a total of almost 200 during the two years of the mission, which will produce more than 1,000 hours of totality. This will be a scientific bonanza, since complete solar eclipses produce only a few minutes of totality when the moon is perfectly aligned between the earth and the sun, on average only once every 18 months.
The sun continues to baffle scientists, especially its crown, which is hotter than the solar surface. Coronal mass ejections result in billions of tons of plasma and magnetic fields that are thrown into space. Geomagnetic storms can occur that interrupt energy and communications, while illuminating the night sky with auroras in unexpected places.
Although previous satellites have generated solar imitation eclipses -including the Orbiter Solar Observatory of the European Space Agency and NASA and the Soho Observatory -the album that blocks the Sun was always in the same spacecraft as the Crown Observation Telescope.
“What makes this mission unique”said Zhukov, “It is that the album that surrounds the sun and the telescope are in two different satellites and, therefore, very separate.”
The distance between these two satellites will give scientists a better vision of the part of the crown closest to the limbo of the sun.
“We are extremely satisfied with the quality of these images, and again this is really thanks to the flight in training ‘with unprecedented precision”said the director of the ESA mission, Damien Galanofrom the Paris Aeronautics Hall.