This solar eclipse was created by 2 satellites flying in formation, allowing astronomers to photograph the Sun’s corona.

With its 5-centimeter aperture, ASPIICS is able to see much closer to the Sun’s surface and with greater clarity than ever before. Proba-3 Occulter eclipsing Sun for Coronagraph spacecraft.

From there, ASPIICS can see more details of the corona and make observations almost down to the very edge of the sun’s surface, which was previously only feasible during natural solar eclipses.

On Monday, June 16, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that its Proba-3 mission created the world’s first artificial total solar eclipse. The mission’s two satellites, the Occulter and ...

The first "Occulter" satellite's 4.6-foot disc cast a three-inch shadow onto the Association of Spacecraft for Polarimetric and Imaging Investigation of the Corona of the Sun (ASPIICS) instrument ...

"ASPIICS will contribute to unravelling long-lasting questions about our home star." Rather than relying on humans, the spacecraft lined themselves up with the sun in a manner "akin to driverless ...

Furthermore, during the total solar eclipse that will occur on the North American continent on April 9, 2024, observation equipment with similar functionality to ASPIICS will be tested.

The images were processed by the ASPIICS Science Operations Center at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, where a team of scientists created photos of the corona based on input from the scientific ...

The ASPIICS instrument will also contain a smaller, secondary occulter disk, to cut down on diffracted light that could spill around the main occulter’s edges.

With its 5-centimeter aperture, ASPIICS is able to see much closer to the Sun’s surface and with greater clarity than ever before. Proba-3 Occulter eclipsing Sun for Coronagraph spacecraft.

From there, ASPIICS can see more details of the corona and make observations almost down to the very edge of the sun’s surface, which was previously only feasible during natural solar eclipses.

The Occulter blocked out the Sun’s bright disk with a 1.4-meter shield, casting an 8-centimeter-wide shadow onto the Coronagraph’s optical instrument, ASPIICS, which then captured the faint ...