We live in a universe of extremes.
As you can probably tell by its name, the Parker Solar Probe is part of NASA’s mission to study the sun. It zooms through the outermost layer of the star’s atmosphere, called the corona, collecting data. In April 2021,, the closest a spacecraft has ever been to the sun. The heat shield projected on one side of the probe makes this possible.
“The job of that heat shield,” Abel says, is to make sure “none of the solar radiation [will] touch anything on the spacecraft.” So, while the heat shield is experiencing the extreme heat of our host star, the spacecraft itself is much colder—around -238 degrees F, she says.As the lead thermal engineer for DART—a small spacecraft designed to collide with an asteroid and nudge it off course—Abel takes practical steps to manage the temperatures of deep space.
Preparing for temperature shifts of hundreds of degrees might sound wild, but it’s just how things are out in space. The real oddity is Earth: Amidst the extreme cold and fiery hot,
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