© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
The total solar eclipse on Monday is called a “once-in-a-lifetime” event and for good reason. Once a particular part of the world witnesses a total eclipse, it might be centuries before that particular part witnesses another one. But even if you are in the path of tomorrow’s eclipse, you will only see totality for a maximum of around four minutes. And if it happens to be a cloudy day, you will not see it at all. That is why some people will be chasing the eclipse on jet planes.
But before we get to the eclipse chasers, why is a total eclipse so rare? Typically, between two to five solar eclipses happen in some parts of the world every year. But total solar eclipses happen only about once every 18 months. But it will only be visible in a small part of the world, and as we mentioned earlier, it could be centuries before that same place witnesses another one.
This is because totality will only be visible to the regions that will be within the umbra — the darkest part of the Moon’s shadow. The umbra is so small that the entire path that total solar eclipses travel through is less than one per cent of the world. Then, you have to remember that about 70 per cent of the globe is underwater. And also, half the land on Earth is considered uninhabited.
Due to all of this, it is very likely that you will only see a total solar eclipse near your location once in your lifetime and even then, only for a few minutes. While that is quite the bummer for most folks like you and me, it is an even bigger problem for scientists, who will be looking forward to collecting a lot of valuable data that can only be gathered during the eclipse.
Since the Moon perfectly blocks the face of the Sun during a total eclipse, it makes the much dimmer corona(the outer atmosphere) much more visible, even to the naked eye. This makes eclipses the best time for scientists to study this enigmatic and still not very well-understood region of the star our planet revolves around. This brief blocking will also help study how the Sun’s light affects Earth’s atmosphere.
But using scientific instruments on the ground to study the Sun during that time could backfire — what if there is cloud cover? That could potentially jeopardise months and maybe even years of preparation for many organisations and individuals across the globe. NASA has come up with a solution that is simple but is more complicated than one could imagine — fly above the clouds and chase the eclipse using jet planes.
Three NASA-funded teams will be sending their scientific instruments into space on the space agency’s WB-57 jet planes. While two of those teams will be capturing data of the corona, the third one will actually measure the ionosphere, the electrically charged upper layer of our planet’s atmosphere.
Flying more than 15,000 metres above the planet’s surface, those jets will be above all the clouds. Not only will they be above the clouds but they will also be above most of the atmosphere, which means that cameras will be able to take better images and capture more wavelengths of light that usually don’t make it to the ground.
And since the WB-57 will be “chasing” the eclipse at 750 kilometres per hour, they will see it for much longer. While no place on the ground will get to see it for more than four and a half minutes, the instruments on the plane will see it for 6 minutes and 22 seconds. This is the second time the agency is using jets to study an eclipse, with the last time being in 2017.
