Two ESA satellites within the Proba-3 mission have for the first time created an artificial total solar eclipse in space – the first in the world to be remotely controlled in real time. This was reported by UNN with reference to the European Space Agency (ESA).
Details
ESA launched two mini-satellites on December 5, 2024 from India to create an eclipse by precisely positioning them at a distance of 150 meters with an accuracy of one millimeter. One of them ("Occluder") obscures the Sun, the other ("Coronagraph") photographs the corona – the outer atmosphere of the Sun, usually invisible due to the brightness of the photosphere.
I was extremely impressed by the images, especially since we got them on the first try. Our "artificial eclipse" is comparable to a natural one – but we can create it every 19 hours and 36 minutes
Additionally
The mission has already performed dozens of eclipses during the setup phases. The longest lasted 5 hours. Up to 200 eclipses are expected during the two-year operation, which is more than 1,000 hours of corona observations – significantly more than during natural eclipses.
Reference
Natural total eclipses last only a few minutes and are rarely available for observation. Proba-3 creates them automatically every 20 hours, providing unprecedented access to long-term observations needed to study space weather.