Spacecraft To The Sun

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) is to send a space probe closer to the sun than any probe has ever gone - and what he finds could revolutionize what we know about our Star and the solar wind influenced by the fact that everything our solar system.

NASA has developed APL develop the ambitious mission Solar Probe, will study the streams of charged particles of the sun hurls into space from a vantage point within the Sun's corona - its outer atmosphere - where the processes that produce heat, corona and solar wind. The next solar sample approach would zip past the sun at 125 miles per second, protected by a carbon composite heat shield, the weight of up to 2600 ° F and survive blasts of radiation energy and dust not on a level with which any previous spacecraft .

Experts in the U.S. and abroad have grappled with this mission concept for more than 30 years run in seemingly insurmountable technological and budgetary policy restrictions. But in February an APL-led team a sample of solar engineering and design study mission to the NASA request to detail how the robot mission could be. The study uses a team APL study in 2005 as a baseline, but then clearly changed the concept to meet demanding cost and technical conditions set by NASA.

"We knew we were on the right track," said Andrew Dantzler, Solar Probe project manager at Apl. "Now we have it all together in an innovative package, the technology is within reach, the concept is feasible and the entire mission can be done for less than $ 750 million [in fiscal year 2007 U.S. dollars] or on the Cost of a medium - Class planetary mission. NASA decided it was time. "

APL designed and built the spacecraft on a timetable for the introduction in 2015. The compact, solar-powered probe would weigh about 1000 pounds; preliminary designs include a 9-foot-diameter, 6-inch-thick carbon-filled foam solar shield summit of the spacecraft body. Two sets of solar arrays would retract or extend, as the spacecraft swings in direction or away from the sun while several loops around the inner solar system, so sure that the plates remain in the correct temperatures and performance levels. At its closest pass the spacecraft must survive solar intensity more than 500 times what spacecraft experiences during an orbit of the earth.

Solar Probe turning seven Venus flybys in the course of almost 7 years gradually shrink its orbit around the sun, come as close as 4.1 million miles (6.6 million kilometers) to the sun, even within the orbit of Mercury and about eight times closer than any spacecraft has before.

Solar Probe is a combination of in-place and remote measurements to achieve the mission is primarily scientific objectives: determining the structure and dynamics of the magnetic fields on the sources of solar wind; track the flow of energy, heats the corona and accelerates the solar wind system to determine what mechanisms to accelerate and transport energetic particles and explore dusty plasma in the vicinity of the sun and its influence on the solar wind and energetic particle formation. Details are set out in a solar probe for science and technology definition study team that NASA version will later this year. NASA version is also a separate announcement of opportunity for the spacecraft's science payload.

"Solar Probe is a true mission of exploration," says Dr. Robert Decker, Solar Probe project scientist at Apl. "For example, the spacecraft will go close enough to the sun to observe the solar wind speed from subsonic to supersonic, and it will fly even though the cradle of the highest solar-energy particles. And, as with all of the missions of discovery, solar Sample is likely that more questions than it answers. "

APL's experience in developing spacecraft to explore the Sun-Earth relationship - or work near the sun - ACE, which recently marked its 10th Year of sampling energetic particles between Earth and sun; time setting, is currently examining solar effects on the Earth's upper atmosphere, the two STEREO probes, which have snapped the first 3-D images of explosive solar events called coronal mass ejections, and the radiation Belt Storm probes, consider the regions of energetic particles trapped by Earth's magnetic field.

Solar sample is fortified with heat-resistant technologies developed for APL MESSENGER spacecraft, which completed its first flyby of Mercury in January and will begin orbiting the planet and that in 2011. Solar Probe solar shield concept was partly influenced by the designs of the Messenger Sonnensegel