The ESA Mission – Observing the Sun’s Wispest Outer Atmosphere During the Total Eclipse on 8 April
Researchers in North America are gearing up for their chance to observe the Sun’s corona — its wispy outer atmosphere — like never before. Normally hidden to the naked eye by the Sun’s glare, the corona will be visible to millions from Sinaloa, Mexico, to Newfoundland, Canada, when the Moon blocks the solar disk during the total eclipse on 8 April. A period of extreme activity that occurs every 11 years coincides with the event. During this time, the Sun’s magnetic fields intensify, creating sunspots, fiery loops of plasma and exciting structures in the corona.
The two craft will have to fly using a combination of satellite navigation and radio-based satellite interlinks. With the two being 150m long, it will be a technical challenge to get them to act as if they are one huge instrument. The ESA says it’s targeting six-hour eclipse observations for each of the crafts’ 19-hour, 36-minute orbits.
One reason scientists are so eager to study the Sun’s corona is its role in our solar system’s weather. Aside from being mysteriously hotter than the Sun’s surface, it contributes to solar wind, and its coronal mass ejections have potential effects on Earth, ranging from the dancing lights of the planet’s auroras to widespread electrical outages (recall every headline you’ve seen predicting a solar storm-induced internet apocalypse). The purpose of the mission is to measure the Sun’s total energy output to inform climate modeling.
The coronagraphs on Earth and in space can only accomplish what light can’t do due to the light spilling over the edge of the light blocking disk. Building the occluding disk into a single spaceship isn’t practical when putting it farther away. NASA tried to block out the Sun in 1975 using an Apollo capsule, according to the release.
Detection of spiky streamers and holes in the solar corona during a total eclipse from South America to Maine, and a prediction by Predictive Science
The agency hopes to launch the Proba-3 mission in September. Its release today comes as much of the US is getting ready to watch on April 8th as the ultimate occulter — the Moon — traverses the Sun and creates a total eclipse that will swing from South Texas to Maine.
The firm’s prediction shows a corona composed of several spiky, spade-like structures called streamers, in which coronal plasma is tightly confined by magnetic field lines that leave the Sun’s surface but loop back into it. The streamers glow brighter because of the electrons that scatter the sun’s light. The prediction shows the dark places between the streamers where the magnetic field lines don’t come back into the Sun but stay in interplanetary space. The holes can create strong gusts of solar wind — charged particles accelerated by magnetic fields — that cause geomagnetic storms threatening Earth-orbiting satellites.
Approximately once every 18 months, Earth experiences a total eclipse. Few people can see their paths in remote areas. There was a total eclipse in North America. Viewers along that eclipse’s ‘path of totality’ — in which the Moon completely blocks the solar disk — “wouldn’t have seen the same Sun as we’re seeing” during this one, says Marcel Corchado-Albelo, a solar physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, who will participate in a public-outreach programme on 8 April aimed at marginalized communities in Texas. The sun was closer to it’s minimum during the previous eclipse.
A preview of what the eclipse will look like was released by Predictive Science last month. Staff members, including astrophysicist Cooper Downs, used satellite data and intensive simulations to make a prediction. “The Sun is quite chaotic,” Downs says. It is as difficult to forecast the appearance of the corona as it is to predict cloud movement. Clouds could obscure the eclipse from the view of many on 8 April.
Downs says that the scientists of the firm would be able to improve their model for future applications by analyzing the locations of streamers and holes in the simulation and actual eclipse.
Habbal and a team of 40 researchers are working to capture minuscule changes in the corona during the eclipse. The scientists will be spread across three sites in Texas and Arkansas, to maximize the chance of a cloudless observation.
One group that is not worried about clouds is the Airborne Coronal Emission Surveyor (ACES) team. The scientists will fly in a jet at an altitude over the clouds of 13 kilometres. This will put them over a layer of water vapour in Earth’s atmosphere that absorbs infrared light and would interfere with their measurements of the corona. The team at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts is interested in studying a streamer in the predictive science forecast.
The team would like to know the strength of the magnetic field in the part of the corona which appears and the makeup of the cations in the streamer. The corona has magnetic fields that affect the light coming from it.
Source: Total solar eclipse 2024: how it will help scientists to study the Sun
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Their flight will chase the Moon’s shadow along the path of totality through Texas, adding 90 more seconds of observation time to the maximum of 4 minutes and 30 seconds that viewers on the ground will get.
