NASA aircraft to chase eclipse shadow off Iceland

NASA will send a Martin WB-57 research aircraft to Iceland to photograph Wednesday’s total solar eclipse while flying off the country’s coast, mbl.is reports. The aircraft will race the Moon’s shadow, which will travel across the sea at 3,200 kilometres per hour and overtake it.

The NASA crew will take off from Keflavík Airport at an altitude of 50,000 feet, or about 15 kilometres. The Martin WB-57 Canberra will fly north towards Greenland before making a gradual turn about 60 kilometres off Iceland’s coast.

Four cameras mounted in the aircraft’s nose will photograph the eclipse as it reaches its peak. NASA scientists hope to capture so-called nanoflares from the Sun, which are difficult to photograph because they can be seen for only the brief period when the Moon completely covers the Sun.

For an observer standing directly beneath the eclipse’s highest point, totality will last two minutes and 18 seconds. The aircraft’s speed of 740 kilometres per hour should allow the crew to extend that period to nearly three minutes.

A shadow travelling at 3,200 kilometres per hour

The Moon’s shadow will travel across the ocean below at 3,200 kilometres per hour. If everything goes as planned, NASA’s cameras will begin recording when the shadow reaches the aircraft.

Cary Klemm, who manages NASA’s sensor equipment at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and has taken part in several eclipse flights, told the British newspaper The Guardian that the light inside the WB-57’s cockpit would change dramatically.

“There will be no clouds above, and then, as if a hand had been waved, the shadow falls. The temperature drops rapidly, and you realise that you need more light from the controls as the strange shadow surrounds you,” Klemm said.

Dr Amir Caspi, the event’s principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said he was extremely excited about the mission.

“Solar eclipses allow us to carry out scientific research that we cannot conduct otherwise,” Caspi said.

NASA has three Martin WB-57 Canberra aircraft, which are described as the only ones of their kind still in existence. All three are operated by NASA.