Proba-3’s journey to see the Solar’s corona

The double-satellite Proba-3 is probably the most formidable member but of ESA’s Proba household of experimental missions. Two spacecraft will fly collectively as one, sustaining exact formation right down to a single millimetre. One will block out the fiery disc of the Solar for the opposite, to allow extended observations of the Solar’s surrounding ambiance, or ‘corona’, the supply of the photo voltaic wind and house climate. Normally, the corona can solely be glimpsed for a couple of minutes throughout terrestrial whole photo voltaic eclipses. Proba-3 goals to breed such eclipses for as much as six hours at a time, in a extremely elliptical orbit taking it greater than 60 000 km from Earth. The 2 spacecraft are being launched collectively by India’s PSLV-XL launcher from the Satish Dhawan Area Centre. Comply with the mission’s deployment and commissioning, as much as its first glimpse of the corona, on this overview video.