What will the eclipse tell us?

On April 8, when the Moon passes directly in front of the Sun, parts of the United States, Canada and Mexico will be plunged into darkness and a total solar eclipse will occur. It’s not just the millions of eager viewers who are excited as NASA engineers plan to make the most of the precious few minutes of darkness by launching rockets directly into the eclipse’s shadow.

These launches have an important scientific goal: to help scientists understand the subject. How would a sudden drop in the amount of sunlight affect our planet’s atmosphere?.

The sudden transition from day to night is known to cause sharp changes in temperature and even force animals to change their nocturnal behavior. But scientists know little about how brief moments of darkness affect the boundary between the upper and lower layers of Earth’s atmosphere, called the ionosphere, which extends 90 to 500 kilometers above the planet’s surface.

Here, ultraviolet solar radiation regularly knocks electrons away from atoms, creating multitudes of electrically charged particles that fill the upper layers of the atmosphere. At sunset, when these ions recombine and turn into neutral atoms, the atmosphere becomes thinner and is expelled again at dawn.

If you think of the ionosphere as a pond with gentle waves, the eclipse is like a motorboat suddenly breaking through the water. It creates a wave just below and behind it, and then as it returns, the water level rises instantly,
says Aro Barjatia, professor of engineering and physics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

By launching three rockets before, during and after the moon shadow changes on the night of April 8, NASA engineers hope to collect enough data to predict such disturbances, which are known to interfere with both radio and satellite communications.

So Barjatia and his team will launch three rockets from the Wallops Cosmodrome on Virginia’s Wallops Island. The moon above this object will block only 81.4% of sunlight, but the team also hopes to use the temporary eclipse to understand this. How common is the “trail” created by a solar eclipse?.

The same engineering team conducted a similar experiment during the Ring of Fire partial solar eclipse last October; During this eclipse, a maximum of 90% of sunlight was blocked by the moon. The results of these runs showed that: Falling sunlight caused disturbances that could affect radio and satellite communicationsThis highlights the need to improve their predictive abilities.

Now scientists will find out whether the disturbances will start at the same altitude and whether their size and scale will remain unchanged.