Topline
Scientists are preparing an ambitious series of scientific missions for Aug. 12, 2026, when the moon’s narrow dark central shadow surges across Earth at 5,000 mph, creating a total solar eclipse for those beneath in Greenland, Iceland, Spain and a tiny part of Portugal. Among them are NASA, the Irish Air Corps and a host of small private aircraft craning for the best sight — and the best science. From aircraft to balloons, here’s everything you need to know about airborne science during the upcoming total solar eclipse.
Key Facts
On Aug. 12, a total solar eclipse will rise in Arctic Russia, cross Greenland, Iceland, Spain and a tiny part of Portugal, and set in the Mediterranean Ocean.
NASA’s WB-57 jet will be flying 50,000 feet above the North Atlantic Ocean, west of Iceland, seeking to observe the sun’s corona — visible only during totality — above most of Earth’s atmosphere.
Simultaneously, an Irish Air Corps C-295 aircraft will perform a similar flight, with scientists on board from the European Space Agency and Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies imaging the sun’s corona using a spare part an ESA space mission.
The crews will try to keep the high-speed jet inside the path of totality — the moon’s umbral shadow — for as long as they can, as it rushes over them, to give scientists and their instruments extra time to study the sun.
Meanwhile, NASA-sponsored researchers will be on the ground in Iceland to launch high-altitude aircraft and scientific balloons to gather valuable data on Earth’s changing atmosphere during the two-hour-long eclipse.
NASA’s Stratospheric Science
The highlights of NASA’s eclipse campaign will be the deployment of its WB-57 high-altitude research aircraft. Flying at around 50,000 feet, the aircraft will carry the SCIFLI Multispectral Airborne Imager (SAMI) in its nose cone, a sophisticated suite of cameras capable of recording the solar corona at 20 frames per second in both visible and infrared wavelengths. The aircraft’s speed of around 460 miles per hour allows scientists to follow the moon’s shadow, extending observation time from just over two minutes on the ground to nearly three minutes in the air. Scientists hope the mission will improve understanding of solar prominences, the million-degree temperatures found within the corona, and how solar material develops into the solar wind that travels throughout the solar system. “The sun is always changing,” said principal investigator Amir Caspi at the Southwest Research Institute. “Every eclipse is different. So we could see things we didn’t see before.”
Ireland’s off-the-coast eclipse
North America’s total solar eclipses in 2017 and 2024 have left a legacy of NASA-sponsored solar science, but this is a European eclipse. Cue a team of scientists from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies with Trinity College Dublin, TU Dublin, the Irish Air Corps and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, who are planning to fly a new instrument called E-CorMag aboard an Irish Air Corps C-295 aircraft. They’ll observe through an open bubble window at about 10,000 feet, roughly 217 miles off Ireland’s west coast within the path of totality. E-CorMag is an instrument that incorporates flight-spare components from instruments on ESA’s Proba-3 mission and NASA’s Solar Orbiter mission. “We will try to measure magnetic field polarization to help us understand magnetic fields in the sun’s corona,” said Dr. Laura Hayes, an assistant professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, in an interview. It’s science that can only be done during the brief totality period of a total solar eclipse. “It’s one of those projects that started as a wild idea and grew legs, and now we have this amazing mission,” said Hayes, a solar physicist who will experience her first total solar eclipse.
Totality from a turboprop
A nine-passenger King Air turboprop chartered from Norlandair will fly from Reykjavík Airport, Iceland, north to south to intercept the path of totality in a flight known as Umbracept. As it does so, its speed will extend totality from 2 minutes 18 seconds to 2 minutes 40 seconds at 30,000+ feet. Passengers, who have paid up to $5,250 per seat, will see the totally eclipsed sun just 25 degrees above the west, out the right-side windows. The flight will last around 1 hour and 45 minutes. “If the weather is overcast gray as we’re about to take off, there’s nothing like the heady feeling of being able to ‘veto the clouds,’” said John Beattie, an eclipse chaser, to Eclipse2026.is.
Balloons above Iceland
Alongside the aircraft mission, NASA is supporting the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project. Student teams from several American universities will travel to Iceland and Spain to launch scientific balloons before, during, and after the eclipse. In Iceland, researchers will release 80 weather balloons over a 26-hour period to examine how the eclipse influences Earth’s atmospheric boundary layer — the layer of the atmosphere closest to the ground. Previous eclipse observations suggested this layer temporarily shrinks under clear skies, but scientists want to learn whether Iceland’s long summer daylight will produce different results. Meanwhile, teams in Spain will launch six balloons equipped with 360-degree cameras and ozone-monitoring instruments. These missions will provide dramatic views of the moon’s shadow from high above Earth while also measuring changes in atmospheric ozone, which depends on sunlight for its formation.
