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Satellites will fly in a mirror pair

09.06.2013

Spanish engineers have created the first twin satellites that will fly in formation (synchronously) with submillimeter accuracy. This will make it possible to create ultra-precise astronomical instruments of a new generation.

In fact, the Proba-3 satellites will move as one solid object, but in reality the two vehicles will be hundreds of meters apart. Thanks to this, in the future it will be possible to create huge space telescopes with segmented satellite mirrors and a total mirror diameter of hundreds of meters. For comparison, today the main mirror diameter of 5-10 m for a space telescope is considered incredibly large.

“Proba-3 will be the first space mission in which two spacecraft will fly as a single unit,” says Salvador Llorente, director of this project from SENER. millimeter".

Indeed, earlier one could only dream of such accuracy in positioning spacecraft. In general, there have been very few missions to create satellite formations, such as, for example, the Swedish project Prisma, but so far the positioning accuracy has been tens of centimeters.

The Proba-3 mission includes two satellites weighing approximately 340 kg and 200 kg. They will be launched in 2017, although the launch site has not yet been chosen, perhaps one satellite will take off from the Indian spaceport, and the other from the American one. This is a unique feature of the mission - both satellites will take off separately and reach perigee at a distance of 600 km from the Earth's surface. The satellites will then reach the apogee of their orbits at an altitude of 60000 km, where testing of satellite synchronization technology with submillimeter accuracy will begin. The satellites will operate at a distance of 20 to 250 m from each other, but will always be accurately synchronized using several optical, laser sensors and special software algorithms.

Interestingly, Proba-3 will use an original observation technique that was already tried during the Soyuz-Apollo mission in 1975: one of the satellites will cover the bright disk of the Sun, and the second will try to see the smallest details in the solar corona.

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