European Space Agency Proba-3 Mission It consists of a pair of satellites orbiting the sun, providing an unprecedented view of the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona. Its purpose is to help scientists better understand phenomena such as the solar wind and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). “We still don’t know how coronal mass ejections occur,” says Andrei Zhukov, the mission’s principal investigator. “With Proba-3, we will be able to see the birth, circumstances, and first steps of the acceleration and development of CMEs. This will help us understand the physics more deeply.”
Studying the corona is complicated because the center of a star is up to a million times brighter than the corona and difficult to image. On Earth, one way to study the corona is during a total solar eclipse, when the moon blocks out the sun’s bright center. However, solar eclipses are rare and study time is limited to a maximum of 10 minutes. Instead, Proba-3 will position two satellites 150 meters apart in front of the sun and autonomously maintain millimeter-accurate positioning using lasers. One of the satellites, known as the Occulter spacecraft, will cast a shadow, or eclipse, onto the coronagraph spacecraft, which collects data via filtered photodiodes to measure light at different wavelengths.
Proba-3 project manager Damian Galano said the technology could be applied to the search for exoplanets in the future. “NASA studied the concept that instead of blocking the light from the sun to observe the corona, there would be a large occulter blocking the light from the star, and in its shadow there would be a large telescope to observe the corona. .To directly image exoplanets orbiting the sun.”
topic:
-
solar eclipse
/ -
solar eclipse 2024