C
CalliArcale
Guest
<p>Lots of us remember the exciting and ambitious Fire & Ice program that, disappointingly, wound up cancelled. It consisted of Pluto/Kuiper Express, Solar Probe, and Europa Orbiter. A variation of the PKE misison is being flown by the New Horizons spacecraft. And now Solar Probe is back too. NASA has called on JHU-APL to develop the new Solar Probe mission.</p><p>The vehicle will have a nine-foot-wide, six-inch-thick sunshade partly based on MESSENGER's sunshade, and this will protect it as it flies to within 4.1 million miles of the Sun. It will experience solar heating 500 times greater than in Earth orbit. It will also be equipped with retractable solar arrays, which will generate power during most of each orbit but then be retracted behind the sunshade during perihelions. Solar Probe is expected to launch in 2015 and then spend seven years gradually reducing its orbit by means of seven Venus flybys. It will fly eight times closer to the Sun than any previous spacecraft and have an unparallelled opportunity to observe the near-solar environment, directly measuring magnetic fields, plasma densities, radiation, etc.</p><p>Major kudos to the NASA officials who fought to get this mission back on the table.</p><p>JHU APL press release </p> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em> -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>