Researchers want to use satellites to simulate a solar eclipse
Published: Wednesday, Apr 3rd 2024, 15:20
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The European Space Agency (ESA) wants to simulate a total solar eclipse with a new space mission. To do this, two satellites will be aligned so that one obscures the sun for the other. Swiss technology is also on board.
The launch of the two satellites in India is scheduled for September, as the project managers announced at a media conference in Antwerp, Belgium, on Wednesday.
The researchers want to use the artificial solar eclipse to study the so-called corona of the sun. This is the sun's outer atmosphere, which appears as a bright ring around the eclipsed part of the sun during a solar eclipse. This is where solar storms occur, which can massively disrupt the infrastructure on Earth.
"Technically extremely demanding"
Without a solar eclipse, the corona is not visible as it is outshone by the brightness of the sun. Normally, however, a solar eclipse only lasts a few minutes. With the Proba-3 mission, it should be possible to study the corona continuously for six to seven hours.
"It is a technically extremely demanding experiment," Dietmar Pilz from ESA told the media. This is because the two satellites have to fly in a very precise formation. According to Pilz, deviations of just a few millimetres between the two satellites could lead to failure.
Davos flies with
Also on board will be an instrument that was developed and built in Davos GR. The measuring instrument called "Dara" (Digital Absolute Radiometer) will be mounted on the front of the two satellites pointing towards the sun, as "Dara" project manager Silvio Koller explained when asked by the Keystone-SDA news agency. Koller and his team at the Physikalisch-Meteorologisches Observatorium Davos (PMOD/WRC) have been building this measuring instrument for around ten years.
The "Dara", which weighs around three kilograms, measures how strongly the sun shines, i.e. exactly how much solar energy hits the Earth's atmosphere. "The Earth's global temperature depends on the radiation balance at the edge of the atmosphere. In other words, how much energy hits the atmosphere and how much energy is emitted again," explained Koller. This is why an exact measurement of the incoming solar radiation is "extremely important".
According to Koller, current space measurements show, for example, that the global rise in temperature cannot currently be explained by increased solar radiation. "Dara" is intended to help ensure a continuous series of measurements of solar radiation.
©Keystone/SDA
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