Photo Credit ( Freepik )
In order to study one of the most significant aspects of our sun, the European Space Agency will soon be able to produce artificial solar eclipses on command using a pair of satellites.
The Sun’s corona, or crown, is hotter and larger than the Sun itself, yet it is obscured by the star’s extreme brilliance. Due to persistent issues with visualising the sun from Earth, its effects—which are also more significant for our society—are very hard to comprehend.
Astrophysicists should be able to obtain exceptional visual insights into the corona by utilising solar eclipses as inspiration for Proba-3, which was planned by 14 member states, constructed in Spain, and launched into orbit by India on December 5.
The Occulter and the Coronagraph are two separate spacecraft that make up Proba-3, which orbits the Earth like our Moon and is spaced roughly 1.5 football fields apart.
As the name implies, the Occulter is the satellite that is closest to the Sun and will completely block out the light from the Sun’s disc for six hours. Since no Earth-bound telescope can image the corona for six full hours, the coronograph gets closer to the Earthling as he sees it.
Damien Galano, the Proba-3 mission manager, describes the challenges of achieving this man-made eclipse.
“Now the hard work really begins, because the two satellites must achieve positioning accuracy down to the thickness of the average fingernail while positioned one and a half football pitches apart in order to achieve Proba-3’s mission goals,” Gelano said, omitting to mention that the satellites are travelling hundreds of miles per hour through space.
The corona resembles a bubble of radiation, heat, and gas. It is in charge of the well-known “solar wind,” from which astronauts and spacecraft must shield themselves from radiation, as well as massive explosions called coronal mass ejections that have the potential to harm or interfere with Earth’s electronics.
In a statement issued on the launch day of December 5, Andrei Zhukov, Principal Investigator for the Proba-3 Coronograph unit and Principal Investigator of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, outlined the reasons why astronomers value the ability to cast eclipses on demand.
Currently, we can use Earth-based and space-based coronagraphs to monitor the high corona while imaging the sun in the extreme ultraviolet to picture the solar disc and the low corona, he said.
Probe-3 will be able to close the large observational gap that exists between around three solar radii and 1.1 solar radii. The solar corona, which is bigger than the sun itself and the cause of space weather and the solar wind, is a crucial component of our solar system despite its faintness.
