In a first, Europe’s Proba-3 and India’s Aditya-L1 spacecraft jointly observe early stage CMEs

Two different space observatories from India and Europe have viewed the same eruptions on the Sun for the first time from different vantage points. India’s Aditya-L1 and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Proba-3 spacecraft recently observed coronal mass ejections (CMEs) very close to the Sun, providing new insights into the early stages of this phenomenon. According to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the two observatories together measured the mass, density, and energetics of these CMEs, and the findings have been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics . The Aditya-L1 spacecraft is deployed at the first Earth-Sun Lagrange Point approximately a million miles away from Earth, whereas Proba-3 operates in a highly elliptical Earth orbit. While both are focused on studying the Sun’s corona (outermost atmosphere), there’s a huge difference in how they operate.