Synthetic photo voltaic eclipse that was developed in Europe gives a brand new view of the solar

Two satellites equipped with European technologies have drawn an artificial solar eclipse delicately, which offers scientists unsurpassed views of the scay of the sun.

The European Space Agency (ESA) developed the probes alongside more than 40 Space -Tech companies. Among them are a trio of startups that contributed several key technologies for the mission: sensors for solar tracking, light detectors for fine -tuning and software that orchestrated the complicated trajectory of the satellites.

Started from India Satish Dhawan Space Center Last year the Expedition-Proba-3-a new era for solar science could mark.

The inner corona of the sun, artificially dark green, recorded in one picture
May 23, 2025 by the Aspiics Coronagraph on board proba-3. Credit: ESA/proba-3/Aspiics

The few satellites revolve the earth at a distance of 150 meters. One of them Ecculter looks like the moon in a solar eclipse on earth. It blocks the sun and lets its counterpart, the coronagraph, look at the outer atmosphere of the sun or “corona” without being blind by the intense light.

The corona of the sun is the utmost part of its atmosphere. Surprisingly, it is far hotter than the surface of our star and sometimes reaches up to 2 million ° C. This turbulent region of considerable radiation gases is the source of solar storms and coronal masses that can disturb telecommunications on earth – and produce Breathtaking northern lights Show.

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The Korona is usually visible for the mere eye during a total solar eclipse, which only gives scientists a short window to examine them. But the performance of proba-3 could change this.

“We can create our solar eclipse every 19.6-hour orbit, while a total of solar interpretises only occur once, very twice a year,” said Andrei Zhukov from the Royal Observatory, which developed the main optical instrument of the coronagraph.

While the natural overall eclipses only take a few minutes, Proba-3 can maintain its artificial solar eclipse for up to 6 hours. Both satellites can remain perfectly aligned with each other and The sun is going through the earth up to a speed of 1 kilometer per second.

This precision is based on the combined innovations of several European companies. The Dutch startup lens F&E, graduate of the Business Incubator of ESA, made sensors available that continuously pursue the position of the sun within a degree and enable the sensitive choreography of flying.

In the meantime, engineers from the Irish company Onsemi (formerly Sensl) added highly sensitive light detectors, which were referred to as silicon photomultors, that measure tiny shifts in the shadow of the sun over the structure of the satellite in order to optimize their positioning during the solar eclipse.

The support of this hardware is software from Poland's N7 Mobile, a startup that is from consumer apps to computer systems control the spaceships. His code contributes to the tube's formation control systems.

All of these technologies are part of a European effort to not only make a six -hour solar eclipse in the orbit possible, but also repeatable.