Dr Alesia Herasimenka

This study investigates the feasibility of a Moon-enabled Sun occultation mission to observe the solar corona, normally obscured by the Sun's brightness. The concept involves positioning a spacecraft behind the Moon to block the incident light coming from the solar disk. Low-thrust propulsion is analyzed to assess its suit-ability for such a mission. The mission geometry includes lunar flybys to modify the orbit, enabling the spacecraft to pass through designated occultation zones. A multi-arc approach is employed to optimize the full trajectory while accounting for mission constraints.

The study of the solar corona has important ramifications on the understanding and forecasting of space weather phenomena. Yet, regardless of scientific breakthroughs brought by space-based coronagraphs, access to the lowest layers of the Sun’s atmosphere remains possible mostly during rare and sporadic total solar eclipses on Earth. This talk introduces the UK-led Moon-Enabled Sun Occultation Mission concept (MESOM), which capitalizes on synodic resonant orbits in the Sun-Earth-Moon four body problem to enable global and high-quality measurements of the inner sun corona below 1.02 sun radii. Our preliminary trade-off analyses show that a mini-satellite platform can reproduce total eclipse conditions in space once every synodic month (e.g., 29.6 days) and for 15 minutes on average, i.e., three times longer than the average eclipse duration on Earth, without image degradation caused by the Earth's atmosphere. With a nominal science operation plan of 2 years, MESOM could collect the equivalent amount of data of roughly 80 eclipses on Earth, making it a once in a life-time opportunity for deepening our understanding of the sun and its atmosphere.

The study of the solar corona has important ramifications on the understanding and forecasting of space weather phenomena. Yet, regardless of scientific breakthroughs brought by space-based coronagraphs, access to the lowest layers of the Sun’s atmosphere remains possible mostly during rare and sporadic total solar eclipses on Earth. This paper introduces the preliminary trajectory design analyses of a Moon-Enabled Sun Occultation Mission (MESOM), which capitalizes on synodic resonant orbits in the Sun-Earth-Moon four body problem to enable global and high-quality measurements of the solar corona below 1.02 sun radii once every synodic month (e.g., 29.6 days)