by CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — April’s total solar eclipse promises to be a scientific bonanza, thanks to new spacecraft and telescopes — and cosmic chance.
The moon will be so close to Earth, providing a long period of intense darkness, while the sun should be more active and potentially have dramatic bursts of plasma. Then there is an overall densely populated corridor stretching from Mexico to the US to Canada.
Hundreds or thousands of thousands of viewers will double as “citizen scientists”, helping NASA and other research groups better understand our planet and star.
They will photograph a corona-like outer atmosphere, or corona, as the moon passes between the sun and Earth, blotting out sunlight for up to 4 minutes and 28 seconds on April 8. They will observe the silence of the birds and other animals as darkness falls at noon. They will also measure temperatures, monitor clouds and use ham radios to assess communication disruptions.
At the same time, rockets with scientific instruments will blast into the electrically charged part of the atmosphere near the edge of space called the ionosphere. The small rockets will rise from Wallops Island, Virginia – about 400 miles outside of totality but with 81% of the sun obscured in a partial eclipse. Similar launches were held from New Mexico during last October’s “ring of fire” solar eclipse that swept across the western US and Central and South America.
“Time for the big one! It’s very exciting!!!” Aroh Barjatya of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, the rocket’s mission director, said in an email.
NASA’s high-altitude jets will also take to the air again, searching the moon’s shadow with improved telescopes to study the sun’s corona and surrounding dust.
“Dust sounds boring,” admitted NASA eclipse program manager Kelly Korreck. “But at the same time, dust is fascinating. Those are the remnants left over from when the solar system was forming.”
College students will launch more than 600 weather balloons on the road, providing live streams as they study atmospheric changes. The cloudy sky should not matter.
“Luckily for us, the balloons flying to 80,000 feet and above don’t care if it’s cloudy on the ground,” said Angela Des Jardins, an astrophysicist at Montana State University who is coordinating the national project.
And if the Federal Aviation Administration approves, a 21-foot (6.5-meter) kite will soar a scientific instrument three miles (5 kilometers) above Texas in an experiment by Shadia Habbal of the University of Hawaii. She, too, wants to get above any clouds that might obstruct her observations of the sun.
Normally hidden by the glare of the sun, the corona is on full display during a total solar eclipse, making it a prime research target. The spiky tendrils that reach thousands of miles (kilometers) into the incredibly hot space are hotter than the surface of the sun – in the millions of degrees, as opposed to thousands.
“In terms of the value of total eclipses, science still cannot explain how the corona is heated to such extreme temperatures,” said retired NASA astrophysicist Fred Espenak, known as Mr. Eclipse better than all his charts and books on the subject.
The US won’t see another total solar eclipse on this scale until 2045, so NASA and everyone else is pulling out all the stops.
April’s eclipse will begin in the Pacific Ocean and make landfall at Mazatlan, Mexico, going up through Texas and 14 other US states before crossing into Canada and out into the Atlantic in Newfoundland. Those outside the 115-mile-wide (185-kilometer-wide) path will experience a partial eclipse.
Scientists got a taste of what’s to come during the 2017 total solar eclipse that stretched from Oregon to South Carolina. This time, the moon is closer to Earth, resulting in more moments of darkness and a wider path.
“Anytime we can look for a longer period of time, that gives scientists more data,” Korreck said.
Another scientific bonus this time: The sun will be only a year away from its maximum solar activity, compared to 2017 when it was near its minimum. That means a lot more action at the sun, perhaps even a coronal eruption during the eclipse, with massive amounts of plasma and magnetic field thrust into space.
There are also two new spacecraft out there studying the sun: NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and the European Space Agency and NASA’s Solar Orbiter. They will join other spacecraft on eclipse duty, including the International Space Station and its astronauts.
Closer to home, the April eclipse, unlike previous ones, will pass over three US radar sites normally used to monitor space weather. The stations will hear what is happening in the upper atmosphere as the skies clear.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Section is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Science and Media Education Group. The AP is solely responsible for all matters.
