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Combined with the cooling effect of hydrogen flowing through channels in the heat shield, these coatings would keep the interstellar probe cool while it blitzed by the sun. That’s more than hot enough to melt through the Parker Solar Probe’s heat shield, so Cheikh’s team at NASA found new materials that could be coated on the outside to reflect away thermal energy. For the APL mission, the probe would spend around two-and-a-half hours in temperatures around 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit as it completed its Oberth maneuver. Really close.Ĭozying up to a sun-sized thermonuclear explosion creates all sorts of materials challenges, says Dean Cheikh, a materials technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who presented a case study on the solar thermal rocket during the recent conference. The Interstellar Probe will have to accelerate from around 30,000 miles per hour to around 200,000 miles per hour in a single shot around the sun, which means getting close to the star.
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That’s about twice the speed the interstellar probe aims to hit and the Parker Solar Probe built up speed with gravity assists from the sun and Venus over the course of seven years. To put this in perspective, by the time NASA’s Parker Solar Probe makes its closest approach in 2025, it will be within 4 million miles of the sun’s surface and booking it at nearly 430,000 miles per hour. In APL’s mission design, the interstellar probe would pass just a million miles from its roiling surface. The closer a spacecraft gets to the sun during an Oberth maneuver, the faster it will go. The sun’s gravity acts like a force multiplier that dramatically increases the craft’s speed if a spacecraft fires its engines as it loops around the star. A solar thermal rocket is only effective if it can pull off an Oberth maneuver, an orbital mechanics hack that turns the sun into a giant slingshot. It’s simple in theory, but incredibly hard in practice. If the interstellar probe makes a close pass by the sun and pushes hydrogen into its shield’s vasculature, the hydrogen will expand and explode from a nozzle at the end of the pipe. The critical difference is the tortuous pipeline hidden just beneath the surface. Externally it would look very similar to the heat shield on the Parker Solar Probe. The rigid flat shell is made from a black carbon foam with one side coated in a white reflective material. Unlike a conventional engine mounted on the aft end of a rocket, the solar thermal engine that the researchers are studying would be integrated with the spacecraft’s shield. “What this is showing is that solar thermal propulsion is not just a fantasy. “It’s really easy for someone to dismiss the idea and say, ‘On the back of an envelope, it looks great, but if you actually build it, you're never going to get those theoretical numbers,’” says Benkoski, a materials scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory and the leader of the team working on a solar thermal propulsion system. They think it could be the key to interstellar exploration.
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It might not sound like much, but Benkoski and his team just demonstrated solar thermal propulsion, a previously theoretical type of rocket engine that is powered by the sun’s heat. The helium absorbed heat from the LEDs as it wound through the channel and expanded until it was finally released through a small nozzle.
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Once the solar simulator was blistering hot, Benkoski started pumping liquid helium through a small embedded tube that snaked across the slab. On Thursday afternoon, Benkoski mounted a small black and white tile onto the trellis and pulled a dark curtain around the set-up before stepping out of the shipping container. This is the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory solar simulator, a tool that can shine with the intensity of 20 suns. The set up looks like something out of a low-budget sci-fi film: One wall of the container is lined with thousands of LEDs, an inscrutable metal trellis runs down the center, and a thick black curtain partially obscures the apparatus. If Jason Benkoski is right, the path to interstellar space begins in a shipping container tucked behind a laboratory in Maryland.