AkaSci 🛰️Eclipses seen from Earth are used to study the Sun, but only for a few minutes every few years.
With Proba-3, artificial eclipses can be created lasting 6 hours every 19.6 hours!
Other spacecraft carry occulters and coronagraphs, e.g, the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). It uses a occulter 0.7 m away that covers 2x the diameter of the Sun, to deal with stray light caused by diffraction.
Proba-3's disk, 150 m away, allows study within 1.1x radii.
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