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Ed Yeates reportingUtah researchers are testing new-generation materials for a unique and historic spacecraft that will fly into the sun. In fact, it will not only go there, where no one has gone before, but it will return to Earth.
It's hard to imagine we could build anything here on Earth that would survive a flight to the sun. But we've reached a point in the development of new materials that NASA now feels confident it's time to make the trip.
It's one thing, this far on Earth, to stand and feel a summer heat of roughly 100 degrees. But try flying directly into the corona of the sun itself.
The corona, or the atmosphere around the sun, is actually several hundreds of times hotter than the visible solar surface. "The temperature they're projecting to be on the shield is 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit. That's about the point where stainless steel melts," explained Ryan Hoffman, with Materials Research at Utah State University (USU).
Jennifer Albretsen, also with Materials Research at USU, said, "That's right where the solar wind is being formed. We've never made that type of measurement before, actually gone to the source."
The shield and the instruments inside will have to be designed to withstand an environment like no other we've encountered before. If internal electronics arc, the spacecraft will die.
"You have to have the spacecraft well enough designed and well enough shielded that you can make very sensitive measurements while you're screaming through this environment. That takes it to a level that's almost unimaginable," said Dr. J.R. Dennison, also with Materials Research at USU.
Unimaginable but doable! A vacuum chamber at USU can throw photons, electrons, radiation, various wavelengths of light and all kinds of charged particles found in the soup of a solar wind. One at a time, the ingredients bombard new-generation ceramic and carbon samples to see how they'll hold up.
The reversed ice cream cone-shaped spacecraft has got to be like nothing that's been built before. "Traveling five times faster than any craft we've had so it can get into the sun and have the energy to get back out," Dennison explained.
Get back out and back to Earth with data that could unravel all kinds of mysteries.
As Ryan Hoffmann told us, if we could predict really big solar storms, we could shelter ourselves, our satellites, our power grids and our computers. The tentative launch date is seven to eight years from now.
E-mail: eyeates@.ksl.com
