European satellites succeed in creating artificial solar eclipse

June 17 (UPI) -- A European space agency created the first "artificial total solar eclipse" using a pair of satellites on Monday.
The space agency Proba-3 showed the first images of the Sun's outer atmosphere -- the solar corona. In its announcement, the agency said that this will help improve the understanding of the sun and its atmosphere.
A pair of spacecrafts was used, the Coronagraph and the Occulter. They flew 492 feet apart for several hours without any control from the ground to create an artificial total solar eclipse's orbit. The two satellites use an optical instrument to take photos of the sun's corona.
The agency's goal for this mission was to observe the sun's corona, which the agency said is important for studying solar wind and understanding coronal mass ejections.
"Many of the technologies which allowed Proba-3 to perform precise formation flying have been developed through ESA's General Support Technology Program, as has the mission itself. It is exciting to see these stunning images validate our technologies in what is now the world's first precision formation flying mission," Dietmar Pilz, ESA director of Technology, Engineering and Quality said.
"I was absolutely thrilled to see the images, especially since we got them on the first try," Andrei Zhukov, principal investigator for ASPIICS at the Royal Observatory of Belgium said.
"Our 'artificial eclipse' images are comparable with those taken during a natural eclipse. The difference is that we can create our eclipse once every 19.6-hour orbit, while total solar eclipses only occur naturally around once, very rarely twice a year. On top of that, natural total eclipses only last a few minutes, while Proba-3 can hold its artificial eclipse for up to 6 hours," said Zhukov.
The Proba-3 mission is led by ESA, managed by Spain's Sener, with more than 29 companies from 14 countries involved.

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