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Aug. 12 2018A Voyage BeginsKennedy Space Center, FloridaAug. 12 2018
Parker’s design is groundbreaking. At its head sits a revolutionary heat shield, an 8-foot-diameter, 4-and-a-half-inch thick barrier of lightweight carbon covered with a superheated carbon-carbon composite. It’s designed to withstand temperatures up to 2,500 F (1,400 C) while keeping the spacecraft’s electronics and instruments at a cozy 85 F (30 C).
The spacecraft’s solar arrays, too, were designed to survive the Sun’s blistering conditions. They rely on a first-of-its-kind active cooling system developed by APL, which uses around 5 liters of pressurized water as a coolant, pumped through titanium radiators and powered by the arrays themselves. With a cooling capacity equivalent to that of a small living room, this technology allows the arrays to maintain a steady temperature of around 320 F (160 C) while continuously absorbing solar energy, even at its closest approach to the Sun.
All this innovation to answer scientific questions that puzzled scientists for decades but couldn’t be answered without going directly into the fire, as it were. What makes the corona over 300 times hotter than the Sun’s surface, about 2,000 miles below? What drives the supersonic solar wind that’s constantly blowing charged particles from the Sun into the solar system? And what’s accelerating those energetic particles, sometimes up to more than half the speed of light?
