ESA Prepares To Create Solar Eclipses To Study the Sun

Andrew Jones reports via IEEE Spectrum: The European Space Agency will launch a mission late this year to demonstrate precision formation flying in orbit to create artificial solar eclipses. In a press conference last week, the agency announced details of the mission and the technology the orbiters will use to pull off its exquisitely-choreographed maneuvers. ESA's Proba-3 (PRoject for On-Board Autonomy) consists of a pair of spacecraft: a 300-kilogram Coronagraph spacecraft and a 250-kilogram Occulter. The pair are now slated to launch on an Indian PSLV rocket in September and ultimately enter a highly elliptical, 600-by-60,530-kilometer orbit. The aim, the agency says, is to move the separate spacecraft to some 144 meters apart, with the Occulter, as a disc, blocking out the sun.

Achieving this formation will allow the Coronagraph to study our star's highly ionized, extremely hot atmosphere -- but also demonstrate the technology as a precursor for more ambitious, future, formation-flying endeavors. ESA has science objectives for Proba-3, using observations made in space to study solar astrophysics without any intervention of the Earth's atmosphere. The agency's Association of Spacecraft for Polarimetric and Imaging Investigation of the Corona of the Sun (ASPIICS) coronagraph will help to discern why the solar corona is significantly hotter than the Sun itself. This could further our understanding of the Sun and assist solar weather predictions. However, it is the precision formation flying that Proba-3 aims to demonstrate which could help unlock future breakthroughs.

Precisely-controlled Occulter spacecraft could be used with space telescopes to block light from a star in order to directly detect potential orbiting planets, while a constellation of spacecraft can, through interferometry, create large-scale observatories, achieving large apertures and long focal lengths than possible with large solo satellites. Further applications include Earth observation, space-based gravitational wave detection, and a range of missions in which two or more spacecraft need to interact, such as rendezvous, docking, and in-orbit servicing.

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