We're just three months away from the
launch of Parker Solar Probe we have one
last test to do for our instruments on
the spacecraft and that's to take our
qualification model of the Solar Probe
Cup, put in this chamber behind me,
and simulate an encounter with the Sun.
If you look at an old-school, analog 70
millimeter IMAX film projector that has
a bulb full of xenon. It heats up to
about the same temperature as the
surface of the Sun. We have to combine
four projectors to get the total amount
of sunlight and the angular size of
the Sun correctly. But we shine that
merged sunlight in through this window
into the chamber and illuminate the
instrument with it.
Outside the vacuum
chamber we have this dull looking metal
box here which is actually a replica of
the spacecraft. So the instrument
actually thinks it's on the spacecraft,
talking to the spacecraft, sending it telemetry.
We're now very much
simulating the real Sun environment.
The next steps, now that the chamber pressure
is dropping, we can bring our ion gun our
particle accelerator on and see if the
instrument functions.
So now that we've turned on the instrument it's reporting
internal diagnostics and one of the
things we're seeing is the electronics
are actually pretty warm. We really don't
have a lot of time to do our tests
before the electronics risk overheating
so we're gonna have to move pretty
quickly.
Chamber pressure's a little on the high side, which is fine, but the particle accelerator actually has its
own circuit that won't allow us to
enable the accelerator if it thinks the
pressure is too high. So we've got to
basically flip a switch to override that
interlock device so we can turn the
particle accelerator on.
Meanwhile the temperature of the electronics box keeps
rising.
We managed to just correctly reprogram the interlock so the particle accelerator is not being inhibited from
turning on we're gonna set up a data
display so as the instrument scans
through voltage we'll see if there's
an ion beam or not.
(cheers)
All right
Ha ha
Ah, look at that.
Beautiful. That's a nice
really strong signal if you look
you know the signal is coming in really clear
really strong coming in at the exact
same energy every time. We've reached
a point where the instrument is able to
outperform the conditions that the
chamber is capable of recreating.
Which is about as good as it gets.
What more do you want when you're trying
to show that an instruments gonna
operate in an extreme environment than
to build the best test facility you can,
to recreate that environment then see if
the instrument is able to outperform
that.
Yeah! We're going to the Sun!
We're going to the Sun!
Ah, that's exciting.
