European scientists are preparing to launch a space mission designed to produce a total solar eclipse on demand.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Proba-3 robotic spacecraft will be launched in a few weeks on a mission that will involve flying a pair of satellites in close formation around Earth. They will be linked by lasers and light sensors, and one probe will block the view of the Sun as seen from the other spacecraft. Its effect will be a solar eclipse that will last for several hours.
Observing these eclipses will revolutionize the study of the Sun and understanding how they disrupt power lines, GPS satellites and other ground-based technology, ESA says. The agency believes the mission will also serve as a beacon for other spacecraft that could revolutionize studies of gravitational waves, exoplanets and black holes.
“This is an incredibly promising technology,” said Francisco Diego, a solar physicist at University College London. It is also technically very challenging. It won’t be easy to make, but it will be very rewarding.”
The mission, which took more than 10 years to plan, involves developing a complex array of sensors that will keep the two satellites locked close to each other with an accuracy of less than a millimeter as they orbit Earth at a distance of They fly 144 meters apart. In effect, the two probes will act as a single 144-meter-long observatory.
Project Proba-3 “When the two satellites are in exactly the right orbit, one releases a disk that covers the Sun exactly as seen from the second satellite, thus producing eclipses that last up to six hours a day.” will have.” The manager, Damien Galano, told it supervisor.
On Earth, a total solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes in front of the Sun, blocking its glare and leaving its fiery atmosphere—the corona—open for astronomers to study.
Unfortunately, total solar eclipses occur on Earth every two years or so on average, and scientists often have to travel long distances and be under weather control to study them, while observations are only made for a few minutes. Diego “This does not allow much time to make detailed observations.” Similarly, devices—called coronagraphs—that mimic eclipses and are mounted on telescopes cannot see the Sun’s inner corona in detail.
Scientists are particularly keen to study the Sun’s inner corona because of the Sun’s temperature. The surface of the Sun is about 6000 degrees Celsius, while the temperature of its corona is about 1 million degrees. “It’s a paradox,” said Andrey Zhukov, principal investigator of the corona test that will be conducted on Proba-3. “You’d expect it to get colder as you get further away from the sun, but it doesn’t.”
By allowing scientists to create solar eclipses that last for hours, Probe-3 should produce data that solves this mystery. We will be able to study the inner corona at length and in detail and produce information that explains why the corona is so hot while the Sun’s surface below is relatively cool. “This should help us understand how the Sun affects space weather,” Diego added.
This point was confirmed by Zhukov: “The Sun is a source of disturbances in space weather that can affect GPS navigation, power transmission and other technologies. We need to understand how it does this.”
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A better understanding of the Sun’s corona will also be important in future space missions. Sometimes an event called a coronal mass ejection occurs, when the Sun throws a huge plume of plasma into space. When this hits the Earth’s upper atmosphere, it produces auroras and can sometimes disrupt power transmission.
“In general, we are protected by the atmosphere and the Van Allen radiation belts that surround the Earth,” Diego said. However, there is no such protection against this radiation in deep space, and if we are going to send men and women to the moon and Mars, we want to be able to understand and predict the behavior of the solar corona and thus avoid it. “Our astronauts are not harmed.”
However, Proba-3 should do more than revolutionize solar physics. As a pathfinder for flying probe technology in the making, it could form the core of an entirely new approach to robotic spaceflight – using a few small satellites to mimic the operation of a giant spacecraft, astronomers say.
“Techniques developed for the Probe-3 operation can be exploited for many other astronomical missions, including groups of satellites that can study black holes, exoplanets, gravitational waves and many other phenomena,” Galano added. “This whole approach to spaceflight holds great promise.”
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