EU Sending a Probe To the Sun

First time accepted submitter Mindflux0 writes "The European Union is going forward with the proposed Solar Orbiter, a space probe designed to study the sun. The probe will orbit closer to the sun than any other man-made object at a sizzling 42 million km. It's planned to launch in 2017 for close to a billion euros."

Comments

It's the ESA not the EU

[rpjs]

The European Space Agency is quite different than the European Union. It includes Canada for a start...

Re:OMG! somebody PLEASE tell me!

[CycleMan]

We have told them it is safe to go to the sun as we will send them at night.

Re:OMG! somebody PLEASE tell me!

[OakDragon]

Don't worry, they're going at... DAMMIT!

Take that Rupert!

[Hatta]

First the News of the World, and now this.

Too much sunlight is as bad as too little...

[Geoffrey.landis]

At least they should be able to power it with solar panels...

Actually, powering a probe close to the sun with solar panels is a significant difficulty, since photovoltaic cells perform poorly when they get hot; high temperatures also degrade the lifetime. The European mission will be taking a lot of steps to decrease the intensity on the solar arrays. It's a much worse problem with Solar Probe Plus, which is going much closer. For SPP, designing a power system that works at distances close to the sun was the key enabling element in the mission design. We will be using concentrator solar cells, operating them off-angle, and, for the part of the orbit closest to the sun, actually cooling the arrays with a pumped-fluid cooling loop to reject heat to radiators that are shaded from the sun.

Re:Too much sunlight is as bad as too little...

[Telvin_3d]

The 'heat' is the solar radiation heating up what it strikes. That heat will radiate back out into space. Likewise the dark side of the space craft will be close to absolute zero.

This is an imperfect understanding of heat and how it works in space. Heat is HARD to get rid of. Very, very, hard. Heat hitting the craft will radiate back into space? Not very efficiently. Radiated energy is about the least effective way to get rid of heat. Very space and mass intensive. The ISS has almost as many square meters of heat radiators as it does solar panels. And the ISS has it easy, with a planetary shadow to work with.

Why is it so hard? Because space isn't cold. The whole 'space-is-barely-above-absolute-zero' thing is technically true and yet wildly inaccurate. Yes, the total amount of energy in a given volume of space is absurdly low. But that's not because the contents are cold. It's because there is nothing there to be measured. Space is a vacuum. As in vacuum thermos. That magical container that keeps hot things hot and cold things cold.

To say that the absolute cold of space will keep things cold implies that there is some cold substance in space that the heat can be transferred to. That simply isn't the case.

The far side of the spacecraft from the sun is going to be exactly the same temperature as the near side because the natural heat conductivity will be orders of magnitude higher than any heat differential caused by radiating heat. Both sides will be baking.

Re:Seems like a foolish way to spend money right n

[wisnoskij]

You do realize it that when you spend money it is not incinerated right?

If the EU spends 1 billion or 100 billion they do not have 1 billion less, it is just redistributed differently.