Why Won’t Our Parker Solar Probe Melt?
This summer, our Parker Solar Probe will launch to travel closer to the Sun than any mission before it, right into the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona.
The environment in the corona is unimaginably hot: The spacecraft will travel through material with temperatures greater than 3 million degrees Fahrenheit.
The Difference Between Heat and Temperature
Parker Solar Probe was designed from the ground up to keep its instruments safe and cool, but the nature of the corona itself also helps. The key lies in the difference between heat and temperature.
Temperature measures how fast particles are moving, while heat is the total amount of energy that they transfer. The corona is an incredibly thin and tenuous part of the Sun, and there are very few particles there to transfer energy – so while the particles are moving fast (high temperature), they don’t actually transfer much energy to the spacecraft (low heat).
It’s like the difference between putting your hand in a hot oven versus putting it in a pot of boiling water (don’t try this at home!). In the air of the oven, your hand doesn’t get nearly as hot as it would in the much denser water of the boiling pot.
So even though Parker Solar Probe travels through a region with temperatures of several million degrees, the surface of its heat shield will reach only about 2,500 F.
Of course, thousands of degrees Fahrenheit is still way too hot for scientific instruments. (For comparison, lava from volcano eruptions can be anywhere between 1,300 to 2,200 F.)
To withstand that heat, Parker Solar Probe is outfitted with a cutting-edge heat shield, called the Thermal Protection System. This heat shield is made of a carbon composite foam sandwiched between two carbon plates. The Sun-facing side is covered with a specially-developed white ceramic coating, applied as a plasma spray, to reflect as much heat as possible.
The heat shield is so good at its job that even though the Sun-facing side of the shield will be at 2,500 F, the instruments in its shadow will remain at a balmy 85 F.
Parker Solar Probe Keeps its Cool
Several other designs on the spacecraft help Parker Solar Probe beat the heat.
Parker Solar Probe is not only studying the Sun – it’s also powered by it. But even though most of the surface area of its solar arrays can be retracted behind the heat shield, even that small exposed segment would quickly make them overheat while at the Sun.
To keep things cool, Parker Solar Probe circulates a single gallon of water through its solar arrays. The water absorbs heat as it passes behind the arrays, then radiates that heat out into space as it flows into the spacecraft’s radiator.
It’s also important for Parker Solar Probe to be able to think on its feet, since it takes about eight minutes for information to travel between Earth and the Sun. If we had to control the spacecraft from Earth, by the time we knew something went wrong, it would be too late to fix it.
So Parker Solar Probe is smart: Along the edges of the heat shield’s shadow are seven sensors. If any of these sensors detect sunlight, they alert the central computer and the spacecraft can correct its position to keep the sensors – and the rest of the instruments – safely protected behind the heat shield.
Over the course of its seven-year mission, Parker Solar Probe will make 24 orbits of our star. On each close approach to the Sun, it will sample the solar wind, study the Sun’s corona, and provide unprecedentedly close up observations from around our star – and armed with its slew of innovative technologies, we know it will keep its cool the whole time.
Parker Solar Probe launches summer 2018 on its mission to study the Sun. Keep up with the latest on the mission at nasa.gov/solarprobe or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
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