EU Sending a Probe To the Sun 160
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."
Too much sunlight is as bad as too little... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.