When I meet him in his office at Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage, a non-descript industrial town some an hour's drive north of London, Chris Draper is sitting at his desk idly flicking a long narrow strip of what looks like cooking foil. Smooth burnished metal on one side, ridged matt black on the other, the thin material makes a crinkly noise as he twists it back and forth.Despite first appearances, this is in fact a crucial component for an ambitious science mission to orbit our nearest star. Although, on further discovery, it does turn out to have a connection to dead cooked animals.“The foil is made out of titanium, so it’d be a bit expensive if you wrapped your roast chicken in it every Sunday,” says Draper, a heatshield engineer. “But the black surface that coats the titanium is made from powdered baked animal bones.”Just 1/20th of a millimetre thick, this animal-bone-coated titanium foil will make up the outer section of the heat shield being fitted to the European Space Agency’s (ESA) new Solar Orbiter spacecraft. Slated for launch in 2017, this probe will orbit the Sun at a distance of around 40 million kilometres (25 million miles). That is much closer to our nearest star than any previous mission, and well within the orbit of Mercury.The spacecraft is being designedto make a detailed study of the Sun and the high-energy particles it blasts across the Solar System. Not only should it give us a better understanding ofour nearest star but also the influence it has on the Earth and the vulnerable technology, such as satellites and power systems, we rely on. (Read more about theeffects of this space weather in aprevious story).Light but toughTo survive its close encounter, Solar Orbiter will have to cope with temperatures that are greater than 550C on the side observing the Sun and below -200C on the opposite side of the spacecraft, while keeping theelectronics, instruments and propulsion system comfortable
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