US EditionESA's Proba-3 Creates First Artificial Solar Eclipse in Space
- In December 2024, the European Space Agency's Proba-3 mission was launched aboard a PSLV-XL rocket from the launch facility located at Satish Dhawan in India to simulate solar eclipses in space.
- This mission follows Solar Orbiter's earlier discovery of the sun's poles and aims to overcome the rarity and short duration of natural solar eclipses by using two satellites flying 150 meters apart.
- Proba-3's twin satellites, the Occulter and the Coronagraph, performed millimeter-precision maneuvers to align and block the sun's disk, revealing the corona in unprecedented detail.
- Damien Galano expressed great satisfaction with the clarity of the images captured, noting that the mission has successfully completed ten artificial eclipses and is targeting totality periods lasting up to six hours.
- The mission will provide continuous, high-resolution monitoring of the sun's outer atmosphere, enhancing knowledge of the streams of charged particles and large expulsions of plasma that influence space weather and conditions on Earth.
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208 Articles
Scientists Line Up Satellites to Create "Artificial Total Solar Eclipse"
Two satellites just carefully lined up to form a perfect "artificial total solar eclipse" in orbit. Earlier this year, the two probes, which are part of the European Space Agency's Proba-3 mission, positioned themselves in a perfect line 492 feet apart to have one of them perfectly obfuscate the Sun's rays. Impressively, they were able to maintain their position with an accuracy down to the millimeter. The outermost satellite then snapped fascin…
When flying 150 meters away, two satellites simulated 10 artificial solar eclipses. While one blockes the sun like the moon, the other points the telescope to the crown that forms the golden aura.
Probe 3 uses its optical instrument to study the corona very close to the Sun's surface, and also detects fainter features than traditional coronagraphs.
White to move and mate in two #680 - Artificial Solar Eclipse by the ESA Proba-3 mission
Here are the first test images of the Sun’s Corona taken by the ESA Proba-3 mission. The images (one in visible light, the other in light emitted by iron atoms where half of their electrons have been stripped off) were taken by the twin Proba-3...
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