September 1, 2015 – To test an instrument for a spacecraft that will fly closer to the sun than any before, engineers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of California–Berkeley used ORNL’s powerful plasma-arc lamp to simulate the sun’s intense heat flux. Tests at ORNL proved that the instrument for the Fields Experiment—which will measure electric and magnetic fields, radio emissions and shock waves coursing through the sun’s atmospheric plasma—can survive high-heat flux during a NASA mission. Solar Probe Plus will pass a mere 3.7 million miles from the sun’s surface, where outside temperatures approach 1,200 degrees Celsius. “During the ORNL tests, that temperature was attained with the plasma-arc lamp operating at only 58 percent power,” said ORNL’s Adrian Sabau.
