New Heat Shield to Protect Mission to the Sun
Technology Infused: NASA-sponsored technology has been employed to develop a state-of-the-art heat shield that will enable an important Heliophysics mission—the Solar Probe Plus (SPP). The newly developed carboncomposite heat shield will protect the spacecraft from the impacts from hypervelocity dust particles and the extreme temperatures it will experience as it travels closer to the sun than any spacecraft has ever been before. The 8-footdiameter, 4.5-inch-thick, carbon-foam-filled solar shield will be placed atop the spacecraft body, facing the sun. Impact: This new heat shield will enable SPP to meet its goal of answering two fundamental science questions: Why is the sun’s outer atmosphere so much hotter than the sun’s visible surface? What accelerates the solar wind that affects Earth and our solar system? To gather the data needed to understand these phenomena, SPP will fly into the sun’s outer atmosphere— the corona—to make in situ measurements of the solar wind. The solar wind is a...