One of NASA's Cold War-era research jets left its Clear Lake area home on Sunday, Aug. 9, on a mission to chase the moon's shadow at 50,000 feet.
The WB-57 high-altitude aircraft departed Ellington Field and landed in Iceland, where it will launch Wednesday, Aug. 12, to intercept the total solar eclipse over the North Atlantic. The aircraft, operated by Johnson Space Center's Aircraft Operations division, has called Ellington Field home since the early 1970s.
NASA confirmed the departure on its verified JSC account on X, saying the team would take off from Iceland to document the eclipse. NASA photographer Robert Markowitz captured images of the aircrew walking out to the jet and the Aircraft Operations team gathered in front of the WB-57 before departure.
Why fly at 50,000 feet?
At that altitude, the WB-57 soars above the water vapor, haze and turbulence that blur ground-based views. The darker, steadier sky lets onboard telescopes pick out fine detail in the sun's corona, according to NASA.
The aircraft carries the SCIFLI Multispectral Airborne Imager, or SAMI, a suite of four cameras developed by NASA's Langley Research Center that records the corona at 20 or more frames per second in both visible and infrared wavelengths, TechTimes reported.
By chasing the moon's shadow at 460 mph, the WB-57 will stretch its window of totality from about 2 minutes and 18 seconds to roughly 3 minutes, yielding hundreds of additional high-resolution frames of the corona.
"We are running another eclipse experiment with the WB-57s with the same instrument that we flew in 2024," principal investigator Amir Caspi of the Southwest Research Institute said in an Aug. 7 Sky & Telescope report. "The instrument is the same, but we are implementing lessons learned from 2024 to better dial in the instrument settings."
NASA flew similar WB-57 eclipse intercepts in 2017 and 2024. The 2026 mission uses improved exposure settings to fix an overexposure problem that affected bright coronal features during the last flight.
How Clear Lake residents can watch
The eclipse will not be visible from the Houston area. Its path of totality crosses northern Russia, Greenland, Iceland and Spain.
But NASA will livestream the event starting at 12:15 p.m. Central on Wednesday, Aug. 12, on NASA+, the agency's website, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, Twitch and Amazon Prime. The broadcast will include footage from the WB-57. NASA's 2024 eclipse broadcast drew more than 15 million concurrent viewers.
About the aircraft
The WB-57 is a converted Martin B-57 Canberra bomber originally built for the Air Force in the 1950s. NASA operates three of the jets at Ellington Field, though one (NASA 927) has been grounded since a gear-up belly landing at the base on Jan. 27. The mid-wing aircraft carries a two-person crew: a pilot and a sensor equipment operator seated in tandem. It can reach altitudes above 63,000 feet and fly for about 6.5 hours with a range of 2,500 nautical miles.
Bonus sky event
Wednesday night also marks the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. With the moon in its new phase, dark skies should allow observers in the Clear Lake area to spot up to 100 meteors per hour after midnight.
Results from the WB-57 eclipse mission are expected after Aug. 12.
