{"id":675459,"date":"2025-06-17T10:10:19","date_gmt":"2025-06-17T07:10:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/artificial-solar-eclipse-engineered-in-europe-offers-new-look-at-sun\/"},"modified":"2025-06-17T10:10:19","modified_gmt":"2025-06-17T07:10:19","slug":"artificial-solar-eclipse-engineered-in-europe-offers-new-look-at-sun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/artificial-solar-eclipse-engineered-in-europe-offers-new-look-at-sun\/","title":{"rendered":"Artificial solar eclipse engineered in Europe offers new look at Sun"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Two satellites equipped with European tech have delicately pulled off an artificial solar eclipse \u2014 giving scientists unmatched views of the Sun\u2019s scorching corona.<\/span><\/p>\n

The European Space Agency (ESA) developed the probes alongside more than 40 space tech firms. Among them are a trio of startups, which contributed several key technologies for the mission: sensors for solar tracking, light detectors to fine-tune positioning, and software that orchestrated the satellites\u2019 intricate flight path.<\/span><\/p>\n

Launched from India\u2019s <\/span>Satish Dhawan Space Centre<\/span> last year, the expedition \u2014 Proba-3 \u2014 could mark a new era for solar science<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"fe-artificial-solar-eclipse-proba-3\"
The Sun\u2019s inner corona, coloured artificially to app<\/a>ear dark green, in an image taken on
23 May 2025 by the ASPIICS coronagraph aboard Proba-3. Credit: ESA\/Proba-3\/ASPIICS<\/figcaption>\"fe-artificial-solar-eclipse-proba-3\"<\/figure>\n

The pair of satellites orbits the Earth in formation, 150 metres apart. One of them, <\/span>Occulter, acts as the Moon would in a solar eclipse down on Earth. It blocks the Sun, allowing its counterpart satellite, the Coronagraph, to view the Sun\u2019s outer atmosphere or \u201ccorona\u201d without being blinded by the intense light.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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The \ud83d\udc9c of EU tech<\/p>\n

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The Sun\u2019s corona is the outermost part of its atmosphere. Surprisingly, it\u2019s far hotter than our star\u2019s surface, sometimes reaching up to 2 million \u00b0C. This tumultuous region of superheated, radiative gases is the source of solar storms and coronal mass ejections, which can disrupt telecommunications on Earth \u2014 and produce <\/span>breathtaking Northern Lights<\/span> displays.<\/span><\/p>\n

The corona is typically only visible to the naked eye during a total solar eclipse, giving scientists only a brief window to study it. But Proba-3\u2019s achievement could change that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe can create our eclipse once every 19.6-hour orbit, while total solar eclipses only occur naturally around once, very rarely twice a year,\u201d explained Andrei Zhukov of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, which developed the Coronagraph\u2019s main optical sensing instrument ASPIICS.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While natural total eclipses only last a few minutes, Proba-3 can maintain its artificial eclipse for up to 6 hours. Both satellites can remain perfectly aligned with each other and <\/span>the Sun to within millimetre precision \u2014 all while racing around Earth at a speed of 1 kilometre per second.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That precision relies on the combined innovations of several European companies. Dutch startup Lens R&D, a graduate of ESA\u2019s business incubator, provided sensors that continuously track the Sun\u2019s position to within fractions of a degree, enabling the delicate choreography of formation flying.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, engineers at Irish firm Onsemi (formerly SensL) added highly sensitive light detectors called silicon photomultipliers, which measure tiny shifts in the Sun\u2019s shadow across the satellite\u2019s structure to fine-tune their positioning during the eclipse.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Supporting this hardware is software from Poland\u2019s N7 Mobile, a startup that pivoted from consumer apps to computer systems that control spacecraft. Its code contributes to the probe\u2019s formation control systems.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

All these technologies are part of a European effort to make a six-hour eclipse in orbit not only possible, but repeatable.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two satellites equipped with European tech have delicately pulled off an artificial solar eclipse \u2014 giving scientists unmatched views of the Sun\u2019s scorching corona. The European Space Agency (ESA) developed the probes alongside more than 40 space tech firms. Among them are a trio of startups, which contributed several key technologies for the mission: sensors…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":675460,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/img-cdn.tnwcdn.com\/image\/tnw-blurple?filter_last=1&fit=1280%2C640&url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn0.tnwcdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fblogs.dir%2F1%2Ffiles%2F2025%2F06%2FProba-3_Occulter_eclipsing_Sun_for_Coronagraph_spacecraft-1.jpg&signature=1120af0518ace2e69579c27d9110b723","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-675459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675459\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/675460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}