Europe’s Proba 3 spacecraft is successfully stacked on ISRO’s PSLV rocket and is set to launch on December 4 for an extraordinary mission that will showcase the new-age precision flying technology. The spacecraft was stacked in the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in India on the PSLV-XL rocket today.
The Proba 3 spacecraft, developed by a collaboration between the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and the European Space Agency (ESA), aims to study the Sun’s corona by creating humanity’s first artificial solar eclipse.
The mission consists of two individual spacecraft named the Occulater Spacecraft (OSC) and the Coronagraph Spacecraft (CSC). The Proba 3 spacecraft will then align itself in a unique orbit that will allow it to study the solar corona for a longer time when it is at the farthest point from Earth.
The mission is a one-of-a-kind mission that will showcase the revolutionary technique of precision flying and synchronization of spacecraft to study the universe in depth. The two probes will carry out this unique mission with tremendous precision to a millimeter scale with pointings of thousands of degrees.
One of the spacecraft has observing equipment and the other spacecraft has an occulting disc that will obstruct the observing telescope precisely revealing only the outer atmosphere of the Sun (Corona) creating an artificial solar eclipse for the first time in Human history.
