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Completed TRL 3 (started at 2, targeting 3)
Solar thermal propulsion (STP) promises rapid transit to the interstellar medium, potentially five times faster than Voyager, to meet the Agency’s future science and exploration objectives. High velocities are achieved by performing an Oberth maneuver around the Sun, which will require the vehicle to approach closer to the Sun than any other human-made vehicle to sufficiently heat propellant to achieve high thrust. To protect portions of the vehicle from the intense solar radiation during the approach, a heatshield is required with a reflective coating that is thermally stable at temperatures up to 2500 K for many hours, which is significantly above the design limit of reflective coatings used to protect previous solar probes, such as the Parker Solar Probe. This goal of this project is to provide an enabling technology for STP – a new reflective coating for the heatshield that maintains thermal stability and reflectance at extreme conditions.
Standard optical coatings are solid solutions and rely on porosity (high-surface area) to scatter light for high reflectivity. However, porosity will be lost to sintering at STP-temperatures. The benefit of this project is that it will use a solid dispersion oxide (two+ non-miscible phases) that will create stable phase-phase interfaces that scatter light for high reflectivity and will not be affected by porosity reduction from sintering.
Previous reflective coatings for solar probe heatshields have been composed of single-phase oxide materials that melt or lose reflectance at extreme temperatures associated with STP. For this project, reflective coatings composed of new materials - binary phase oxides - were designed, fabricated, and tested at high temperature. The new reflective coatings are demonstrated to outperform conventional options used for previous solar probes – higher melting points, lower vaporization rates, and designs that mitigate melting and loss of reflectance at STP temperatures.
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