NASA Is Going to Dip This Cup Into the Sun’s Corona - Issue 15: Turbulence
▻http://nautil.us/issue/15/turbulence/nasa-is-going-to-dip-this-cup-into-the-suns-corona
When Justin Kasper, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, daydreams, he visualizes a spacecraft the size of a Toyota Prius speeding through the sun’s corona—a cloud of superheated plasma. The vessel, NASA’s Solar Probe Plus, will be closer to our star than any manmade object has ever been—only 4 million miles from its surface. There, the sun shines 512 times brighter and is 20 times wider than what we see on earth. Flying at 450,000 miles per hour, the Solar Probe will be the fastest thing we have ever put into space, and the toughest one too—its 4.5-inch-thick carbon foam heat shield, sandwiched between carbon plates, can withstand temperatures of 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Operating at around room temperature beneath this shield are computers and other (...)