21 total solar eclipse will be the first time that the NASA jets and its cameras have been used for astronomy, Caspi said. The jets have since been rebuilt and retrofitted with a suite of sophisticated instruments and sensors, including stabilized high-resolution cameras in the nose of the aircraft that can record visible light andinfrared light at 30 frames per second.Ĭaspi said the camera system was developed by NASA to monitor the space shuttles during re-entry to the atmosphere, as a precaution in the wake on the space shuttle Colombia disaster in 1986. Air Force for weather monitoring and were used to collect high-atmosphere air samples after suspected nuclear tests, according to NASA. NASA's WB-57 research jets started out in the 1960s as B-57 Canberra bombers. 'We get better image quality, we get longer observing time, we get less scattered light - so we have higher sensitivity to all the things that we're trying to look at in so many different ways.'īy using cameras at an altitude of 50,000 feet to observe the eclipse, the researchers can be certain of perfect weather for the duration of the eclipse. 'We basically get better sensitivity in every respect,' Caspi said. The thin atmosphere and the position of the sun and moon almost directly overhead will reduce distortion to a minimum, which will allow the telescopes and cameras aboard the aircraft to record very fine details in the structure of the sun's corona, he said. The NASA jets will fly well above any clouds and most of the atmosphere that envelops the earth, guaranteeing perfect weather at a time of year when eclipse watchers on the ground can expect around 50 percent cloud cover, he said. 'The thing is, that they are very smooth and well-organized, and it looks like a freshly combed head of hair.'īut the magnetic fields that shape the corona originate in the very chaotic surface of the sun, which would be expected to twist the smooth structures of the corona into a tangled mat, Caspi said.īut, 'all these structures stay stable and very well organized, and so the corona is constantly releasing little bits of complexity in order to stay that well organized,' he said, 'and we don’t understand how that process happens, either.' High-altitude viewĬaspi explained that observing a solar eclipse from an altitude of 50,000 feet (15,200 m) has many advantages over observations from the ground. 'When you look at the corona, you see these very well-structured loops, arcades, fans and streamers,' he said.

If thermodynamics worked in the classical sense that we are used to, then you wouldn't get this kind of inversion, and the temperature would fall off as you go higher.'Ĭaspi and his colleagues hope their observations will reveal very fine dynamic features in the solar corona, perhaps in the form of ripples or waves, that could reveal processes in the sun's magnetic field that are thought to keep the thin corona so much hotter than the solar surface.Ī second major aim is to search for an explanation for the large visible structures in the corona, Caspi said. 'This kind of temperature inversion is unusual. 'The solar corona is at a temperature of millions of degrees, and the visible surface of the sun - the photosphere - is only a few thousand degrees,' Caspi said. They hope it will shed light on the main mystery of the corona: Why is it so much hotter than the surface of the sun itself? The high-resolution images captured by the jets during the eclipse will give the researchers a unique moving view of the sun's corona.

Eclipse sun corona