Why scientists still chase eclipses in the age of probes
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- The 12 August total solar eclipse — Western Europe's first since 1999 — will deliver totality across eastern Greenland, western Iceland, and northern Spain, drawing researchers deploying balloons, aircraft, and ground instruments along the path.
- NASA, ESA, and university groups still chase eclipses because, as solar physicist Ryan French explains, observations don't require "tens of millions of pounds" in spacecraft grants — "the barrier to entry is much lower" than bidding for a mission.
- The Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project will send US university teams to Spain and Iceland; Spanish balloons will reach 27–37 km altitude carrying 360-degree cameras, ozone instruments, and radio experiments to measure how the eclipse perturbs the planetary boundary layer.
- NASA's WB-57 high-altitude aircraft will measure polarised coronal light during the 2026 eclipse, flying above clouds to observe infrared wavelengths inaccessible from the ground.
- Citizen CATE, funded by the US National Science Foundation and NASA, will use telescopes spread along the path of totality to produce a 60-minute timelapse of the corona — a format that will be expanded during the longer August 2027 eclipse.
- The Besselian Elements Team records flash spectra at the path's edge to refine eclipse maps and calculate the sun's actual radius, a fundamental measurement complicated by the sun's lack of a solid surface.
- NASA's Liz MacDonald, founder of citizen-science project Aurorasaurus, will deploy all-sky cameras in Iceland to test whether aurora can be detected during totality — a long shot, but one where even a non-detection could constrain eclipse-darkness models.
Why it matters: Total eclipses give research groups a rare, low-cost window onto the sun's inner corona — letting them run novel experiments with balloons, aircraft, and spectroscopy for a fraction of the cost of a dedicated spacecraft, while also probing Earth's atmospheric response to sudden darkness.
