The European Space Agency (ESA) Proba-3 mission was successfully launched yesterday on an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre.
The Proba-3 mission includes two spacecraft, the Occulter and a Coronagraph spacecraft that will fly in formation with one spacecraft occulting the sun, thus mimicking a natural solar eclipse.
The mission includes important technology from NGC Aerospace who contributed embedded software intelligence for guidance, navigation and control.
Jean-François Hamel, Vice President of Space Systems and PROBA-3 Project Manager said, “This is especially important for the PROBA-3 mission since the software developed by NGC will autonomously control the orientation of the two satellites to millidegree accuracy and their position to millimeter accuracy, while maintaining their nominal distance of 150 meters, to achieve a perfect eclipse.”
Other Canadian contributions comes from MDA Space supplying laser metrology electronics and MSCI reaction wheels.
The two satellites will fly together autonomously and perform six hours of formation flying per orbit, 150m apart. Proba-3 will be on a highly elliptical orbit, around 60 000 km from Earth.
Seventeen countries and 29 companies contributed to the mission.
In the ESA news release ESA’s Proba-3 mission scientist Joe Zender said, “There was simply no other way of reaching the optical performance Proba-3 requires than by having its occulting disc fly on a separate, carefully controlled spacecraft. Any closer and unwanted stray light would spill over the edges of the disc, limiting our close-up views of the Sun’s surrounding corona.”
With respect to the science of the mission, Andrei Zhukov of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, Principal Investigator for Proba-3’s ASPIICS (Association of Spacecraft for Polarimetry and Imaging Investigation of the Corona of the Sun) coronagraph said, “Despite its faintness, the solar corona is an important element of our Solar System, larger in expanse than the Sun itself, and the source of space weather and the solar wind.”
Zhukov added, “At the moment we can image the Sun in extreme ultraviolet to image the solar disc and the low corona, while using Earth- and space-based coronagraphs to monitor the high corona. That leaves a significant observing gap, from about three solar radii down to 1.1 solar radii, that Proba-3 will be able to fill. This will make it possible, for example, to follow the evolution of the colossal solar explosions called Coronal Mass Ejections as they rise from the solar surface and the outward acceleration of the solar wind.”
