Two satellites just carefully lined up to form a perfect "artificial total solar eclipse" in orbit.
Earlier this year, the two probes, which are part of the European Space Agency's Proba-3 mission, positioned themselves in a perfect line 492 feet apart to have one of them perfectly obfuscate the Sun's rays.
Impressively, they were able to maintain their position with an accuracy down to the millimeter.
The outermost satellite then snapped fascinating pictures of the Sun's corona, the outermost part of our star's atmosphere, something that's generally speaking only possible during a natural solar eclipse.
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 mounted to the second "Coronagraph" satellite, allowing it to get an uninterrupted view of the Sun's corona.
The spectacular satellite dance could give researchers new ways to study solar wind, or the continuous flow of particles from the Sun. It could also give them new views of coronal mass ejections, powerful explosions of plasma and magnetic fields that have been linked to radio blackouts and GPS outages here on Earth.
"It is exciting to see these stunning images validate our technologies in what is now the world’s first precision formation flying mission," said ESA director of technology Dietmar Pilz in a statement.
Researchers behind the stunt are excited to gather even more images and data of the Sun's corona.
"I was absolutely thrilled to see the images, especially since we got them on the first try," ASPIICS principal investigator Andrei Zhukov added. "Now we are working on extending the observation time to six hours in every orbit."
"Each full image — covering the area from the occulted Sun all the way to the edge of the field of view – is actually constructed from three images," he explained. "Combining the three images gives us the full view of the corona."
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