Here’s a hot one!
Build a spacecraft that can fly to within four million miles of the Sun and study a region that has never been explored by a space probe.
Doing so will require the satellite to be equipped with a high-tech heat shield to thwart searing 2,550 degree Fahrenheit temperatures.
The NASA mission is called Solar Probe Plus. The small-car-sized spacecraft is slated for launch in 2018, taking five years to reach its closest orbit of the Sun. At that point the craft should get a speeding ticket – that is, it will be zipping through space at a blistering speed of more than 100 miles per second!
Put another way, at closest approach, Solar Probe Plus will be hurtling around the Sun fast enough to get from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., in one second.
After launch, the spacecraft will make several flybys of Earth and Venus before setting out for orbit around the Sun. The flybys will help allow it to be inserted into the correct, elliptical orbit around the Sun.
Fastest space probe ever built
Why the need for a probe to the Sun?
The major question the Solar Probe Plus team hopes to answer is what drives the solar wind, a stream of charged particles whipping off the Sun at millions of miles per hour that eventually affects the solar system and Earth.
Another important question researchers hope to answer is why the Sun’s corona — a region of plasma surrounding the Sun that is visible during solar eclipses – is hotter than its surface.
Also, the mission should help scientists to better forecast the radiation environment in which future space explorers will work and live.
It was announced September 15 that a team from the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder has been awarded $6.7 million from NASA to design, develop and test instruments for Solar Probe Plus.
As the fastest space probe ever built, the spacecraft will orbit 22 times closer to the Sun than Earth and well inside the orbit of Mercury to better understand how the Sun ticks.
A toasty temperature
Explains Robert Ergun of CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics:
“This is what we call forefront science — nobody has ever been this close to the Sun before, and we hope it will eventually help us to understand how the universe works, since the Sun is one of many trillions of stars in the universe and the only one that we can get to from Earth. As NASA puts it, this is our first visit to a star.”
Both the heat shield and the antennas for Solar Probe Plus will be made with a material known as “carbon-carbon” – consisting of a carbon fiber knitted together with a carbon matrix.
“This will be one of the most challenging missions NASA has ever attempted,” Ergun said. “If the heat shield is even a few degrees off its angle toward the Sun, the spacecraft will literally be toast.”
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland is designing and will build the spacecraft, on a schedule to launch no later than 2018.
By LD/CSE