A pair of European satellites has rocketed into orbit on a mission to create artificial solar eclipses.
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Each fake eclipse should last six hours once operations begin next year. That's considerably longer than the few minutes of totality offered by aBilled as a tech demo, the two satellites will separate in a month or so and fly 492 feet apart once reaching their destination high above Earth, lining up with the sun so that one spacecraft casts a shadow on the other.
“This has a huge scientific relevance” in addition to testing high-precision formation flying,” said the European Space Agency’s technology and engineering director Dietmar Pilz. With a lopsided orbit stretching from 370 miles to 37,000 miles away, the satellites will take nearly 20 hours to circle the world. Six of those hours — at the farther end of the orbit — will be spent generating an eclipse. The first results should be available in March, following checkout of both craft, according to the space agency.
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