NASA Installs Heat Shield on Private Spacecraft for Journey to Hunt Life on Venus
The space agency boasted in a press release that it's working with Rocket Lab, a California-based aerospace manufacturer, to apply a heat shield onto the small space capsule that's scheduled to launch next summer.
Along with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rocket Lab has since 2021 been planning its Venus Life Finder mission that will, as the name suggests, check for signs of life amid the cloudtops of the second planet from the Sun. To prepare the 50-pound probe — which will also track weather patterns on the uber-acidic world — for the intense heat of our Solar System's hottest planet, NASA is applying a brown woven material that can protect crafts from temperatures up to 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
Known as the Heatshield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology, or "HEEET" for short, the rugged spacecraft outerwear that looks like something out of "Star Wars" was invented at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. To test it out, researchers subjected the woven material to extremely high temperatures at the Ames' Arc Jet Complex, which NASA bills as the highest-powered "arc-heated hyper-thermal test facility" in the US.
While NASA clearly has the infrastructure to support and test out these sorts of materials, the woman running the Venus Life Finder mission has suggested that private companies like Rocket Labs will be able to launch these sorts of projects for far less money than the agency could.
"We hope this is the start of a new paradigm where you go cheaply, more often, and in a more focused way," explained Sara Seager, the project's principal investigator, in an MIT news release back when the mission was first announced in 2021. "This is a newer, nimbler, faster way to do space science."
Indeed, as the Planetary Society notes, the Venus Life Finder mission was estimated by the MIT Tech Review to cost less than $10 million — a minuscule amount compared to the $500 million per project price tag on NASA's DAVINCI the Jet Propulsion Lab's VERITAS, which both are slated to go to Venus soon.
As fascinating as the mission will be once it launches, the probe isn't going to spend very much time sailing through the Venusian clouds. As MIT Tech notes, the 50-pound capsule will likely only have about five minutes to transmit its findings back to Earth as it falls further and further down to the planet's surface, where it will end its days.
To make sure the capsule survives long enough to radio its discoveries back to Earth during that short window of time, some majorly high-tech gear will be necessary to protect it — and luckily, NASA's got just the thing.
More on planetary visits: NASA Spacecraft Whipping Around Mars to Slingshot Itself Toward Jupiter's Mysterious Moon
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