Total Solar Eclipse August 12: NASA Films Corona From a Jet

NASA will not watch Wednesday’s total solar eclipse on August 12, 2026, from the ground alone. The agency is sending its WB-57 research aircraft up to 50,000 feet, about 15 kilometers, to chase the Moon’s shadow, while student teams from Iceland and Spain release a combined 86 research balloons. Cameras aboard the jet target the Sun’s corona, while the balloons measure what happens to the atmosphere when daylight suddenly cuts out.

The path of totality crosses Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia, the Atlantic Ocean, Spain and a small part of Portugal. The partial phase will be visible across much of Europe, most of Canada, the United States from Alaska to North Carolina, and the northwest of Africa. As we reported earlier, Serbia will see the eclipse only as a crescent before sunset, without a single moment of totality.

No observer on the ground will get more than 2 minutes and 18 seconds of totality. That is the whole reason for chasing the shadow.

How does the plane extend the eclipse?

By moving in the same direction as the shadow itself. The WB-57 flies along the eclipse path at roughly 460 miles per hour, about 740 kilometers per hour, which stretches its view of totality to nearly three minutes instead of the 2 minutes and 18 seconds available on the ground. The gain is under a minute, but it is measured in seconds of corona footage, and the corona visibly changes even within those seconds.

Flying at 50,000 feet solves two more problems. The aircraft sits above every cloud layer, so overcast skies above Iceland or Spain cannot decide the outcome of the campaign. The second benefit is physical: the plane also flies above the layer of atmosphere that absorbs part of the infrared radiation, so its cameras can capture wavelengths that are practically impossible to record from the ground, wavelengths in which the corona has been photographed only a handful of times.

The instrument in the plane’s nose

The aircraft’s nose houses SAMI, short for SCIFLI Multispectral Airborne Imager, a set of four cameras developed by the SCIFLI team at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The cameras shoot at least 20 frames per second, in both visible and infrared light, capturing structures, outbursts of material and rapid changes in the corona.

The imaging targets three things:

• the formation of prominences, material that appears to hang above the Sun’s surface
• the mechanism that heats the corona to nearly a million degrees
• the link between material in the corona and the solar wind, which streams out of the Sun through the entire planetary system

Kelly Korreck, who leads NASA’s eclipse program at agency headquarters, explains why this data can only be gathered from Earth:

From our unique vantage point on Earth during a total solar eclipse, scientists can study the Sun’s corona in a way they cannot anywhere else in the solar system.

SAMI is not new. The same instrument flew aboard the WB-57 during the total eclipse of April 8, 2024, and the team came away from that flight with a list of fixes: exposure times have now been adjusted so the brightest structures, overexposed last time, are captured correctly, and the data processing now runs on software written since then, so results should arrive faster than they did after 2024.

The project’s principal investigator is Amir Kaspi of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. His case for repeating the same measurement: “The Sun is constantly changing. Every eclipse is different. That is why we might see things we have not seen before.”

What are the balloons from Iceland and Spain looking for

The second part of the campaign is not looking at the Sun at all, but at the air overhead. The balloon program, called the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project, is led by Angela Des Jardins of Montana State University, with student teams from several American universities doing the flying.

From Iceland, two teams are launching a combined 80 balloons, starting 18 hours before the eclipse and continuing until eight hours after it. Their target is the boundary layer, the part of the atmosphere that touches the ground and whose thickness depends on surface temperature and air moisture. Earlier flights during the October 2023 and April 2024 eclipses showed that this layer collapses where skies are clear, but not where clouds are present. Iceland in August has long days and short nights, so the nighttime effect that normally drives changes in the boundary layer may be weaker this time.

“Will this eclipse be able to break down the boundary layer?” asks Matthew Bernards, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Idaho who leads one of the Icelandic teams.

From Spain, three teams are launching six balloons fitted with 360 degree cameras that photograph the Moon’s shadow from above. Those balloons also carry instruments that measure ozone, which needs sunlight to form. Similar measurements in April 2024 showed a drop in ozone during totality, and this eclipse falls at a different time of day and in a different season.

Broadcast and the limits of the measurements

NASA’s broadcast begins on August 12 at 1:15 p.m. Eastern Time, or 7:15 p.m. Serbian time. Totality over Iceland falls at 1:45 p.m. Eastern, and over Spain at 2:28 p.m. Eastern, which is 7:45 p.m. and 8:28 p.m. in Serbia.

What this campaign will not deliver is worth stating plainly. The aircraft footage lasts just under three minutes and, on its own, does not settle the question of coronal heating, open for decades; it only adds one more set of images in wavelengths where few exist. The balloon measurements describe a single day at two points on the North Atlantic and southern Europe, so the results do not extend to the atmosphere in general. And the 2023 and 2024 finding, that the boundary layer collapses under clear skies, remains for now a correlation between the eclipse and the measured change, not a proven mechanism. That is exactly why the measurement is being repeated.