Advanced Technology Teams Up
NASA has combined their many advanced forms of the latest technology, developing a workable product from the space shuttle and designs used for the Apollo program, in order to produce elements of the next spacecraft. This newly designed spacecraft is being designed in order to deliver future astronauts to the moon. One sign of this space advancement is in the form of a prototype heat shield, arriving at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center as Constellation Program workers were excited to finally view the finished product, one of the first pieces of Orion’s full-scale test hardware. And also, it is the same size and dimensions of a previous one that was planned to protect the Orion spacecraft, entering Earth’s atmosphere on it’s way back from either the Moon or the International Space Station.
“When (it) got here at the end of November, it was very exciting because it is the first piece of hardware,” said Joy Huff, a NASA shuttle orbiter thermal protection system engineer who is leading Kennedy’s work on Orion’s heat shield. “Not flight hardware, but it is flight-type material. And just to see the full size, it really gives you a scale of the size of it.”
The heat shield is the largest one of its kind ever built at five meters in diameter. Huff said that the prototype was built largely just to prove it could be done. The prototype, also known as a manufacturing demonstration unit, was also created by the need to develop heat shield evaluation, inspection and handling procedures according to Jim Reuther, project manager of the Crew Exploration Vehicle thermal protection system at NASA’s Ames Research Center. The base of the heat shield endures the most heat and will burn away or “ablate” as it travels at more than 25,000 miles per hour through the atmosphere.
A leading candidate material called PICA is used to make the prototype heat shield. PICA stands for phenolic impregnated carbon ablator material. The material had been used for the base heat shield of Stardust, a small robotic spacecraft that successfully completed its mission of obtaining comet samples and returned to Earth in January 2006. The heat shield of Stardust could possibly be casted in a single piece because Stardust is less than three feet in diameter while many pieces are needed to make Orion’s heat shield. Its heat shield is 16.5 feet in diameter and requires 200 pieces of PICA blocks.
While the prototype heat shield rests in Hangar N at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, it will undergo several months of non-destructive evaluation testing or NDE, which includes laser scans and x-rays. “We want to get it into the x-ray facility to use x-rays to look for these known flaws,” Huff said. The team at Kennedy has to learn the best way to move and handle the heat shield before any NDE testing can be held. Huff is looking forward to a special milestone to happen by late summer. That will be turning all handling and NDE testing results over to Lockheed Martin. The Constellation Program’s mission of putting man on the moon and beyond will be one step closer when that event takes place.
This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 9:22 am and is filed under The Gear to Get There. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
