ESA’s Proba-3 mission, capable of creating solar eclipses, takes off

Dec. 5 () –

ESA’s Proba-3 mission was successfully launched on December 5, at 09:38 UTC, aboard a PSLV-XL rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, India.

Proba-3 is a technology demonstration mission and the first precision training flight mission. A pair of satellites will fly together, maintaining a fixed configuration as if they were a single large rigid structure in space, to test formation and rendezvous flight technologies.

The mission will demonstrate formation flying in the context of a large-scale scientific experiment. Maintaining position to within a millimeter, one Proba-3 spacecraft will line up in front of the other, about 150 meters awayto project its shadow precisely on the other.

As an artificial eclipse, the shadow provided by the first spacecraft will cover the fiery face of the Sun so that its tenuous ‘coronal’ atmosphere becomes visible surrounding. The enigmatic corona – much hotter than the Sun itself – is where space weather originates, a topic of broad scientific and practical interest, according to the ESA.

On Earth, scientists must travel the world to position themselves for brief glimpses of the Sun’s corona that last only a few minutes at a time during total solar eclipses. However, new cutting-edge technologies applied to Proba-3 mean that the mission will be able to create “solar eclipses on demand”.

The Proba-3 instruments will look closer to the solar edge than was previously possible in space, for up to six hours straight during each approximately 19-hour orbit around the Earth.