Early tomorrow morning will see the launching of an unusual European place mission call Proba-3 , which will take off from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota , India . The launching is schedule for around 5:30 a.m ET on Wednesday , December 4 , and will see a twosome of spacecraft launch into orbit to try and execute a extremely precise maneuver to produce an “ artificial solar occultation . ”
The launching of the mission will be cover by India ’s space agency , the Indian Space Research Organisation , and will also be available to stream on the European Space Agency ( ESA ) ’s Web TV . you may watch using the link below , with coverage staring just after 5 a.m. ET ( 3:30 p.m. local time ):
The couple of ballistic capsule are designed to study the sun ’s corona , or the region directly around the Dominicus ’s airfoil , but that come with one with child challenge : the sun is so bright that it blots out any detail of the aureole around it . To deal with this , one of the Proba-3 spacecraft will play as a coronagraph , meaning its Book of Job is to vaporize slightly in front of the other and slur out the light from the brightest part of the Lord’s Day . Then the other spacecraft can take meter reading of the corona without the public eye of the sun by using the shadower from its mate .
“ ESA has flown constitution flying missionary work before , but the distances involve have been measured in the ten-spot of kilometers or more,”explainedDamien Galano , Proba-3 mission manager . “ Proba-3 is very dissimilar because our planet will be flying just one - and - a - half football fields away from each other during active formation flying . And their relative positions will be maintained on the button to just a single millimeter for six hours at a time . ”
This method of blocking out the Lord’s Day entail that only sure orbits will work , though . Many commission sit in low - solid ground range , where object like the International Space Station or the Hubble Space Telescope domicile , but that would n’t turn for Proba-3 because the potent pull of Earth ’s gravity and fluctuation in the atmosphere would upset the delicate positioning of the span . Another pick would be a complex orbit around the Lord’s Day call a Sun - Earth Lagrange Point , such as where the James Webb Space Telescope orbits , but this was too far away and too expensive for a little mission .
Instead , the pair will terminate up in an ellipse - shaped electron orbit , moving from just 370 mi altitude at its skinny to 37,000 naut mi at its furthest over each orbit of 19 hours and 36 minutes . The ballistic capsule will line themselves up autonomously when they are in a good spot to observe the sun , using positioning engineering like GPS , ocular cameras , a optical maser link , and tincture position detector to mechanically move into the correct positions .
Though the space vehicle will collect science data , the chief heading of the mission is to test out this Modern method acting for observing the sun . The pair will try a variety of formation over their two - year life-time to test out different slipway to observe the sun .
