A pair of spacecraft just launched to create hundreds of artificial solar eclipses in orbit.
The European Space Agency mission, called Proba-3, will allow scientists “to see an eclipse on demand,” as one satellite blocks the other’s view of the sun, says mission scientist and solar physicist Andrei Zhukov of the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels.
That, in turn, will allow researchers to readily study the middle part of the corona, the uppermost region of the sun’s atmosphere. Scientists suspect that many of the sun’s most enduring mysteries, from how the solar wind is accelerated to why the corona is so much hotter than the surface of the
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