![]() ![]() According to Jim Kinnison, mission system engineer for PSP at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, the TPS comprises “an 11cm-thick, 3m-across irregular disc made of carbon foam”. ‘This is an extremely exciting, but also scary mission.’ Eric Christian, Nasa Goddard Space Flight CentreĪs PSP approaches the Sun, it will begin to experience excessively high heat loads that require something extra: a specialised thermal protection system (TPS), more commonly known as a heat shield. ![]() On the other hand, to maintain a stable internal temperature and counteract radiation from the shadowed side of the spacecraft, the main body is heavily insulated and incorporates strategically placed heaters to avoid cold spots. Thus most spacecraft designs incorporate reflective surfaces to reject solar heating and radiator panels to reject excess heat generated by electronic and microwave components. The role of the thermal engineer is to create an environment within the spacecraft such that science instruments and other hardware experience something close to the classical ‘room temperature’ of physics experiments here on Earth (about 20☌). In common with all spacecraft, the Parker Solar Probe (PSP) contains electronics and other components designed, manufactured and tested in typical cleanroom environments. The probe will experience a solar intensity more than 500 times that of a spacecraft in Earth orbit – which puts the pressure firmly on the thermal design engineers. One only has to think how hot it can get on Earth, 150 million km from the source of the heat. ![]() The engineering challenges of diving into the Sun’s outer corona (which, incidentally, is hotter than the surface) are immense. This is just 4 per cent of the distance between the Earth and the Sun and much closer than any previous spacecraft. The Parker Solar Probe (formerly Solar Probe Plus) will be launched to the Sun in summer 2018 and placed in orbit within 3.9 million miles (about 6.2 million km) of the surface. When Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters wrote ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ in the late 1960s, he could not have predicted Nasa’s latest attempt to push the boundaries of space exploration. ![]()
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