As millions of skywatchers witnessed the Great South American Solar Eclipse on July 2, a European satellite observed the celestial event from space.
While eclipse-watchers in parts of Chile and Argentine had the chance to see the moon completely block out the sun for a total solar eclipse, the European Space Agency's Proba-2 satellite was only able to see a partial solar eclipse — in which the moon covers just a portion of the sun — from its vantage point in space. However, the satellite saw the moon eclipse the sun four separate times in the amount of time that people on Earth saw just a single eclipse.
Proba-2 is a technology-demonstration satellite circles planet Earth at an altitude of about 435 to 500 miles (700 to 800 kilometers) in a sun-synchronous orbit, which means that it travels along the line between day and night with a nearly continuous view of the sun. The satellite was able to see the eclipse on four separate occasions because it orbits the Earth about 14.5 times per day.
Back on Earth, the partial phase of the eclipse began when the moon's shadow first touched our planet at 12:55 p.m. EDT (1655 GMT). After crossing over the Pacific Ocean and South America, the shadow slid off our planet at 5:50 p.m. EDT (2150 GMT). Over the course of those 4 hours and 55 minutes that the eclipse was visible from Earth, Proba-2 dipped in and out of the moon's shadow four times.
Proba-2 launched in 2009 on a mission to study the sun and space weather events using a suite of instruments. It captured these images of the solar eclipse using an instrument called SWAP (short for "Sun Watcher using Active Pixel System Detector and Image Processing").
This was not the first time that the satellite has watched a solar eclipse; it also recorded videos of the Great American Solar Eclipse of Aug. 21, 2017, along with numerous other eclipses that have occurred during its time in orbit.
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