Parker Solar Probe has been around since 1958 in some form or another and now in
2018 and we're getting ready to actually launch Parker Solar Probe. A lot of that has
to do with the fact that getting some of the Sun is actually really hard and
there's a lot of technology that needed to be developed in order to enable this
mission there are many enabling technologies the
solar arrays were very important the autonomy was very important one of the
ones that was obviously also critical is the heat shield and developing the
technology actually protect the probe at the Sun that titanium truss was also
specially designed for Solar Probe. It's actually really a neat piece it's a a
welded titanium trust that's about four feet tall but it only weighs about 50
pounds and the key there is we're trying to minimize the conduction between the
heat shield and the spacecraft so you want to have as little stuff there as
possible the Parker Solar Probe heat shield is
basically one giant sandwich panel and a sandwich panel is a lot like a honeycomb
panel you find in a traditional spacecraft or on airplanes you have two
outer face sheets and then you have a core in this case the two outer face
sheets are carbon carbon composite which is a lot like the graphite epoxy you
might find in your golf clubs it's just been superheated and then the inside is
a carbon foam so the Parker Solar Probe heat shield has a white coating that's
on the Sun facing surface of this giant frisbee that's protecting the rest of
the spacecraft and that white coating was specially designed to here at the
Lab in collaboration with REDD and the Space Department as well as the Whiting
School at Johns Hopkins proper to actually work at the Sun, and was
specifically designed for Solar Probe and the concept is basically you'd
rather be in a white car in a hot day than a black car the hot day it's just
that it just knocks down the heat that much more and so it's helping us stay
cool at this the particles of the corona are very hot
like 3 million degrees however they're very dispersed it's not all 3 million
degrees everywhere it's a little hard to visualize but think about when you are
baking cookies and you have your oven and you can stick your hand in and your
hand doesn't burn up but if you touch something then you'd burn yourself so
similarly when we're actually at the sun's corona we're not getting that hot
because there's just not as much there so the temperature is actually lower
than the overall temperature of the particles that are active the chrome
when we're at closest approach the front surface of the heat shield will be at
about 2500 degrees Fahrenheit the back surface the heat shield will be about
600 degrees Fahrenheit but then the spacecraft bus is basically sitting at
85 degrees Fahrenheit so the shield is actually really keeping everything very
cool and that's most the stuff that's on that bus additionally there are a couple
of instruments that are hanging out off the truss and they will be hot like the
heat shield like SPC and FIELDS there's our brave instruments sticking out in
the Sun but everything else will be kept at that nice temperature, 85 degrees (F) so
they can be working properly and giving all that great science data that we're
so excited about after working on this for 10 years it is really a pleasure to
see it kind of actually coming to fruition to be one small part of this
huge engineering team that is making science dreams come true it's just
amazing I can't wait to rewrite textbooks and
change the way we look at the Sun forever I'm whole ball of excited and I
honestly don't know exactly how I'm gonna feel at launch but I'm really
excited to pass this off to the Mission Operations team and see all the science
data that comes down and just get to enjoy all that Solar Probe brings us