Astronomers hope the Proba-3 mission will help them get a better view of the corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, which is even hotter than the sun's surface.
Astronomers hope the Proba-3 mission will help them get a better view of the corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, which is even hotter than the sun's surface.In this illustration, the two spacecraft of Proba-3 fly in precise formation about about 500 feet apart to form an external coronagraph in space. One spacecraft eclipses the sun to allow the second to study the invisible solar corona.
"The ability of this mission to observe the corona so close to the sun for extended periods is an extraordinary opportunity," Talwinder Singh, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Georgia State University, tells NPR."If successful, it will pave the way for similar missions that provide continuous, high-resolution observations of the sun's corona.
The moon covers the sun as it creates a total eclipse on Aug. 21, 2017, in Cerulean, Ky. The corona, the outer atmosphere of the sun, is visible."Similar instruments, called coronagraphs, have been used in the past. However, traditional coronagraphs place the occulter disk on the same spacecraft as the imaging camera. This design has limitations, such as light diffraction, which restricts how close to the sun we can observe," Singh says.
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