The long-standing human fascination with solar eclipses took a seismic step forward this month with the European Space Agency's launch of its Proba-3 mission. The groundbreaking project, the ESA said, will enable researchers to create "solar eclipses on demand for six hours at a time."
Proba-3's twin satellites, Occulter and Coronagraph, will work in tandem to create a "precisely controlled shadow from one platform to the other," the ESA said, allowing "sustained views of the sun's faint surrounding corona." The satellites were launched together from India's Satish Dhawan Space Centre earlier this month.
Once in position, Occulter will "line itself up with the sun and use a disc — the stand-in for the moon — to cast a shadow onto the Coronagraph," which can then be analyzed and studied like a natural eclipse, The Washington Post said. That may seem like a fairly straightforward proposition, but what makes the Proba-3 mission so special is the degree of precision involved: The mission's satellites must "achieve positioning accuracy down to the thickness of the average fingernail while positioned one and a half football pitches apart," said Proba-3 mission manager Damien Galano.
If everything goes to plan, the receiving Coronagraph satellite will be able to record data on the sun's corona, its "wispy, unfathomably hot outer atmosphere," said Space.com, a sister site of The Week. Scientists hope that by artificially generating eclipses, they can also study the "counterintuitive" temperature of the sun's corona, which is approximately 200 times hotter than the star's actual surface, said Gizmodo. | 
