CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A pair of European satellites launched into orbit Thursday on their first mission to create an artifact. solar eclipse Fly through space in a flashy formation.
Once operational next year, each false solar eclipse should last six hours. this is, natural solar eclipse Here on Earth, corona of the sunor the external atmosphere.
The launch took place from India.
“We are a very happy science team here,” European Space Agency mission scientist Joe Zehnder said in an email in India.
Touted as a technology demonstration, the two satellites separated in about a month and flew 492 feet (150 meters) apart when they reached their destination above Earth, with one spacecraft shadowing the other. Align with the sun so that it falls.
According to the European Space Agency, this requires extremely high precision, to within just one millimeter, the thickness of a fingernail. To maintain position, satellites fly autonomously using GPS, star trackers, lasers, and radio links.
Each cube-shaped spacecraft is less than 5 feet (1.5 meters) in diameter. Shadow-casting satellites carry disks that block sunlight from other satellites’ telescopes. This disk mimics the moon in a natural total solar eclipse, with the darkened satellite pretending to be Earth.
“In addition to testing high-precision formation flight, this has great scientific relevance,” said Dietmar Pilz, Director of Technical Engineering at the European Space Agency.
Scientists will need to completely block out the bright side of the sun for this mission to take a closer look at the corona, the wispy crown that surrounds the sun near its edge. They are particularly interested in learning why the corona is hotter than the sun’s surface, and learning more about coronal mass ejections, the ejection of billions of tons of plasma into space accompanied by magnetic fields. I want to understand.
The resulting geomagnetic storm could disrupt power and communications on Earth and in orbit. Such explosions can also produce amazing aurora borealis in unexpected places.
Satellites, which have eccentric orbits ranging from 370 miles (600 kilometers) to 37,000 miles (60,000 kilometers) away, take nearly 20 hours to orbit the Earth. Six of those hours are spent producing an eclipse at the far end of a given orbit. The other orbits will be used strictly for formation flight experiments, the European Space Agency said.
First eclipse results should be available in March after both spacecraft check out.
Zehnder said solar eclipses occur at least twice a week, and each corona observation takes six hours of total time. The frequency depends on solar activity, he noted, and could be a boon for scientists who have to travel around the world for just three to five minutes during occasional total solar eclipses.
The $210 million mission, called Proba-3, targets a total of at least 1,000 hours “on demand” during its two years of operation. Once their missions are complete, both satellites will gradually lose altitude and eventually burn up in the atmosphere, likely within five years.
A last-minute problem with the backup propulsion system for one of the satellites, which is essential for precision formation flight, delayed the launch by a day. The European Space Agency said its engineers were relying on computer software fixes.
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