‘You’re hit with a slam of shadow’: Nasa’s air mission to capture rare eclipse data
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- NASA is launching a WB-57 aircraft from Iceland to intercept the moon’s shadow at 50,000 feet, aiming to reach the point of greatest eclipse as the shadow moves over the North Atlantic at more than 2,000 mph.
- Dr Amir Caspi leads the mission from Southwest Research Institute and states that solar eclipses enable unique scientific observations of the sun’s corona and nanoflares—magnetic explosions releasing energy equivalent to thousands of atomic bombs.
- Cary Klemm, a NASA sensor equipment operator, describes the experience of totality at high altitude as a sudden 'slam of shadow' with visible darkness, temperature drop, and increased instrument lighting needs inside the cockpit.
- The WB-57 aircraft carries four cameras in its nose cone that will capture dozens of images per second in multiple light wavelengths, allowing observation of solar prominences and nanoflares only visible when the sun’s disk is fully obscured.
- NASA chose aircraft over ground or space-based observation because high-flying planes avoid cloud cover and atmospheric distortion while enabling more data transmission than space instruments, crucial for handling terabytes of eclipse imagery.
Why it matters: Scientists gain rare access to study the sun’s superheated corona and nanoflares—key to understanding space weather that threatens satellites, astronauts, and power grids—by extending totality nearly three minutes via aircraft, a method that captures far more high-bandwidth data than space-based tools allow.
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