OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, shielded by Silicon Valley-designed heat shields, lands with precious cargo on Sunday
As a primordial space rock hurtles toward Earth on Sunday morning, it will be protected by a heat shield invented in Silicon Valley.
The metallic material — lighter than water, with yellow and brown streaks — was designed in specialized wind tunnels, where air gets heat-blasted by a lightning-like arc of electricity, at NASA’s Mountain View facility. To be sure, plenty of asteroid samples can be found here on Earth. Because asteroids orbit the sun in erratic elliptical loops, they often tumble, fall and disintegrate, spewing easy-to-find debris.
While there, its cameras made an unhappy discovery: Instead of wide plains of sand and gravel, as expected, Bennu is a boulder-filled hellscape. This raised concerns that sample collection might be impossible. But rather than burn and break apart, the capsule deflects and dissipates the heat. That’s because the NASA Ames heat shields don’t insulate. And they push away hot air. In addition to the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, this material protected NASA’s Stardust Return Capsule, which captured interstellar dust, as well as the SpaceX capsule that delivers goods to the International Space Station.
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