Dec. 5 (UPI) — The European Space Agency said two spacecraft were launched from India on Thursday, designed to form a single ship that will create an artificial solar eclipse in orbit.
Satellites on the Proba-3 rocket will fly in formation within millimeters of each other as if they were one giant spacecraft, ESA said. The agency said 14 ESA member states came together in what they hope will demonstrate a new, highly skilled autonomous control and maneuver in space.
Proba-3 was launched Thursday morning from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, India, with the satellites stacked on a four-stage rocket.
“Proba-3 has been in the making for many years, supported by ESA’s General Support Technology Program, which promotes new technologies for space,” Dietmar Pilz, ESA’s director of technology, engineering and quality, said in a statement. “It is an exciting feeling to see this challenging venture reach orbit.”
Damien Galano, Proba-3’s mission manager, said that now that the mission is off the ground, critical challenges still lie ahead.
“Now the hard work really begins, because to achieve Proba-3’s mission objectives, the two satellites must achieve positioning accuracy within the thickness of the average fingernail, while positioned one and a half football fields apart.”
Radhakrishnan Durairaj, chairman and managing director of NewSpace India Limited, said his agency was “honoured” to be part of the ESA mission, which was launched into orbit using six solid rocket boosters.
The satellites will eventually reach a highly elliptical orbit during their mission, which will take them from 600 kilometers from Earth to within 60,000 kilometers.
