Two satellites that astronomers hope can create an artificial solar eclipse were launched last week from a site in India. Starting in 2025, each satellite will trigger a periodic solar eclipse lasting six hours, much longer than the few minutes that natural eclipses cause.

In addition to carrying out this experimental maneuver, ESA’s so-called Proba-3 mission will observe a part of the Sun’s ethereal corona that is difficult to see from Earth. The pair of satellites are currently orbiting the Earth in lockstep, but will eventually separate using a highly precise and technical process. Each satellite is smaller than a small car but packed with probes and other sensors. The larger spacecraft, known as the Coronagraph, will explore the Sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, while the smaller spacecraft Occulter will undertake a journey through the same region with special navigation sensors and low-impulse thrusters that will allow the Coronagraph to accomplish its task Work.

Specifically, the Occulter spacecraft will be positioned at just the right distance for a 4.6-foot (1.4-meter) disk mounted to Proba-3’s Occulter spacecraft to obscure the Sun’s surface, reducing the glare of the to block the star and cast a 3-inch (8 centimeters) shadow on the Coronagraph satellite. By doing so, scientists hope to learn more about the superheated gases that make up the sun’s corona.

The mission has two goals: Capture photographic images of the corona every two seconds to help scientists search for small, fast-moving plasma waves that could greatly increase the corona’s hellish temperatures. and also look for evidence of plasma jets playing a role in accelerating the solar wind, or a cloud of solar particles ejected from the sun at speeds of up to 1.2 million miles per hour (2 million km/h). could.