+ 1970 News Releases (7.6 Mb PDF file) - NASA

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N_TIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
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483-5111 7O-28
February 24, 1970
Texas
Houston, Texas---A team of scientists and engineers from the NASA
Manned Spacecraft Center will take a hard look at the Sun during the total
solar eclipse on March 7.
The scientific team of MSC's Space Physics Division will be set up
on a mountain in southern Mexico where it will conduct seven experiments
aimed at learning more about the Sun. The group will photograph the
sun through an assortment of telescopes as the Sun is totally blocked
out by the Moon at 11:38 a.m. CST on March 7.
The eclipse will be total in a band about 85 miles wide, running
from the southwest (in the Pacific) across Mexico, along the eastern
seaboard of the U. S. and northeast over Nova Scotia. The shadow caused
by the eclipse will first touch land on the west coast of southern
Mexico_ near Puerto Angel, pass over the isthmus of Mexico, the Gulf of
Mexico, across Florida near Apalachicola and along the eastern seaboard,
leaving the continental U. S. at Norfolk, Virginia.
The MSC group will have their telescopes_ cameras and associated
equipment set up in the Mexican State of Oaxaca outside the town of
Miahuatlan. Miahuatlan, some 300 miles south of Mexico City_ has
relatively clear skies and affords the best location to view nature's
most spectacular phenomenon. It is also the geographic point where the
total eclipse has its longest duration_ about 3½ minutes.
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