United States – NASA is preparing for the total solar eclipse on Monday, April 8, when the moon’s shadow will pass over a vast area of North America, by sending two planes to chase it.
The US space agency will launch two of its WB-57 jets to photograph this rare event, tracking the path of the eclipse across the United States, and training special instruments equipped with the planes to study the outer atmosphere of the sun, known as the corona (or corona).
By studying the Sun’s outer atmosphere and its electrically charged ionosphere, three teams of NASA scientists hope to better understand the structure and temperature of the corona, how the Sun affects our planet’s ionosphere, and spy on any errant asteroids that are normally hidden in the Sun’s glare.
“The eclipse is a controlled experiment,” Bharat Kunduri, principal investigator for ionospheric measurement and an assistant professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, said in a statement. “It gives us an opportunity to understand how changes in solar radiation can affect the ionosphere, which in turn can affect some of these technologies like radar and GPS that we rely on in our daily lives.”
The WB-57 aircraft can fly above cloud cover and atmospheric particles, reaching altitudes of up to 15,000 meters above the ground, to capture clear images in visible and infrared light.
Planes will precisely time their takeoffs and flights as the eclipse passes. It will reach speeds of 460 mph (740 km/h), extending the total observed time by an additional 25%, making it approximately 6 minutes and 22 seconds. (For comparison, the longest total eclipse visible on Earth will be 4 minutes and 27 seconds in Torreon, Mexico.)
The term “total” refers to the short period during which the Moon completely covers the Sun, leaving only the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, visible. This creates a stunning spectacle as the sky darkens dramatically and the sun’s corona appears glowing around the dark disk of the moon.
As it races along the eclipse’s path to the east, spectrographs mounted on aircraft will measure the temperature and elements inside the coronal and its explosions, called coronal mass ejections. At the same time, the cameras will measure the light of the middle and lower corona to mid-infrared wavelengths, and take images at such high resolution that they might reveal a dust ring close to the Sun that is believed to be home to asteroids.
Shadia Habbal (Syrian-American), a researcher at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii and the lead scientist in one of the experiments, said in the statement: “By extending the duration of the total eclipse, we are increasing the duration of the amount of data that we can obtain.”
Finally, a third experiment will study the effect of the Moon’s shadow on the Earth’s ionosphere, which will enable scientists to return with an accurate measurement of the extent of its charge.
Source: Live Science
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2024-04-07 21:29:11
