Orion’s thermal protection system is essential to successful future missions.
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Orion has been updated to feature an improved thermal protection system, including a main heat shield and a grid of tiles known as the back shell.
Engineering teams are preparing Orion’s heat shield to perform re-entry during any of missions planned near the Moon or in high lunar orbit in the coming years.
Orion re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere at about 30,000ft/second in it’s last mission, and for the upcoming EM-1 mission, it’s set to come it at about 36,000ft/second. That’s where this new metallic coating comes in.
For these future Orion missions, a silver, metallic-based thermal control coating will be bonded to the crew module’s thermal protection system back shell tiles.
For its next mission, Orion will sit atop the Space Launch System rocket, called Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1).
According to NASA, this new heat shield will keep the temperatures of Orion ranging from -100 degrees Celsius to 290 degrees Celsius.
Instead of a monolithic outer layer, the heat shield will be made of about 180 blocks that can be made simultaneously with the other heat shield components to streamline the labour-and-time-intensive manufacturing process.
Crafting a heat shield for an interstellar spacecraft is complicated; it must be able to shield the craft from extreme heat while near a hot body such as the Sun and while entering the atmosphere of a planet, but it also needs to retain heat while in a colder, more distant location.
NASA’s engineers have also managed to tinker around with the heat shield’s weight reducing it significantly, particularly with its underlying structure, composed of a titanium skeleton and carbon fibre skin.
Orion flew its first test mission in December of 2014, when it climbed to about 5,800 km above the Earth’s surface before returning through the atmosphere, deploying parachutes and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.
Artist’s depiction of NASA’s Orion spacecraft mated to a European-built service module.
However, Orion will carry a pair of solar arrays to help keep the capsule powered in space – technology that Apollo did not use.
Nasa has also used a few hard lessons to improve the heat shield.
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NASA has released new artwork that reflects the latest look for its Orion deep-space crew vehicle – and it’s highly reflective.
