A NASA WB-57B on the ramp at Ellington Field near Houston ready to chase totality next month during the historic August 21st total solar eclipse. Credit: NASA/JSC
Posted on 07/14/2017 3:29:27 PM PDT by BenLurkin
“We are going to be observing the total solar eclipse with two aircraft, each carrying infrared and visible light cameras taking high definition video,” Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Principal Investigator on the project Amir Caspi told Universe Today. “These will be the highest quality observations of their kind to date, looking for fast dynamic motion in the solar corona.”
Total solar eclipses provide researchers with a unique opportunity to study the solar corona – the ghostly glow of the Sun’s outer atmosphere seen only during totality. NASA plans a battery of experiments during the eclipse, including plans to intercept the Moon’s shadow using two aircraft near the point of greatest totality over Carbondale, Illinois. Flying out of Ellington Field near Houston Texas and operated by NASA’s Johnson Spaceflight Center, NASA is the only remaining operator of the WB-57 aircraft.
Flying at an altitude of 50,000 feet, the aircraft will intercept the 70 mile wide shadow of the Moon. The shadow will be moving at 1,400 miles per hour – twice the speed of sound – versus the WB-57 aircraft’s max speed of 470 miles per hour. The flight will extend the length of totality from the 2 minutes 40 seconds seen on the ground, to a total of about 8 minutes between the two aircraft.
The two converted WB-57 Canberra tactical bombers will track the eclipse using DyNAMITE (Day Night Airbourne Motion Imagery for Terrestrial Environments), two tandem gimbal-mounted 8.7-inch imagers, one for visible light and one for infrared. These are located in the nose of the aircraft and will shoot 30 frames per second.
A NASA WB-57B on the ramp at Ellington Field near Houston ready to chase totality next month during the historic August 21st total solar eclipse. Credit: NASA/JSC
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
I’m thinking that time for Snake River might have a typo.
Not on the ones I worked on.
RB-57B and EB-57B’s in 1971 at Otis AFB, MA.
Lol! I think you’re right.
Thanks.
I just did a search and found out that it was called a shotgun starter tho it actually used a blank cartridge. It created a large black cloud when used.
They must have changed to another system by the time you worked on them.
The Jun 30, 1973 total eclipse was chased by a Concorde prototype specially outfitted for the observation event.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8q8qwk/the-concorde-and-the-longest-solar-eclipse
I did see an F-4B started that way when we didn’t have a start cart available right at that time at MCAS, Beaufort, SC. Took about 3 cartridges to get it going.
But never saw one used on a 57. Always had a start cart or an APU available when we needed one.
I’m looking forward to this... I’m about a 30 minute drive south-east of the totality, in a suburb of KC, Overland Park, KS.
Mark
...and great, big turbofan engines...
IIUC, the actual operational altitude of some variants is still classified...
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