UK company to make sun orbiter
The European Space Agency has given a 300 million euro contract to UK space company Astrium to build a sun circling satellite.
ESA’s SolO project aims to understand the sun’s own atmosphere — the heliosphere abound with high-energy particles accelerating towards the planets. It will go very close to the sun, inside Mercury’s orbit where no machine has ever been.
“Solar Orbiter is a fantastic mission,” said ESA director, Prof. Giménez Cañete.
“It will help us understand how the sun, essential to almost all life on the earth, forms the heliosphere and the origin of space weather, which can have an enormous influence on our modern civilisation.”
Astrium’s biggest challenge is to protect SolO for the extreme heat of our star. They plan to build a shield that will bring down the temperature from 500 degrees to room temperature so that the electronics inside it can function.
The sensors like cameras and other instruments will reside behind shutters that will open only when measurements/observations need to be taken.
The finished product will also need to get around the issue of damage from solar winds that sometimes pose a threat to electronics even on the earth. Representatives of Astrium and the ESA signed the deal at the London’s Science Museum on Thursday to coincide with Britain’s 50th anniversary of its first step into space. It became a space faring nation in 1962 with the launch of earth satellite Ariel-1. The sun orbiter was selected in a contest among European space scientists where the wining idea would be taken up by the ESA as a generously mission.
The satellite will be ready much before the launch scheduled in 2017. Nasa is also helping the ESA by providing the launcher, one sensor and another instrument.
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