Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Gardamorg

The [solar-powered antimatter factory] stations would be destroyed by mass coronal ejections, you don't put something that close to the sun and expect it to survive, unless you could build it really strong, and if it weren't made of photovoltaic material, than it wouldn't work.

What’s your source of this prediction, Gardamorg?

We orbited Mariner 10 within the orbit of Mercury in 1974. CMEs occur from about 0.5 to 6 times a day, and Mariner 10 didn’t fail due to them, but rather when it ran out of propellant in 1975.

There are certainly challenges to operating spacecraft near the Sun. As with all spacecraft, preventing and managing damage to delicate electronics is critical. Heat dissipation, always a problem with spacecraft that generate a lot of heat, is a problem even for those that don’t. Mariner 10 managed heat in part by angling its solar panels to control how much it absorbed. MESSENGER, which is currently making a series of Mercury flybys to adjust it trajectory to begin orbiting Mercury in 2011, uses both solar panel angling, and a reflective and insulating heat shield that keeps most of the spacecraft in shadow.

The same team that designed and built MESSENGER, JHU/APL, is planning a dedicated solar probe spacecraft, named rather unimaginatively Solar Probe, planned launch in 2015, that will have an orbit that brings it within 10 solar radii (about 6.6e6 km) of the Sun, about 10 times closer than Mercury.

A close orbiting solar-powered factory like I describe would need a more effective heat dissipation system than spacecraft that have or are planned to closely orbit the Sun. Radiators are the obvious and traditional approach. I’ve read about a few more novel ones.