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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: yard_man who wrote (93242)	2/4/2003 11:37:46 AM
From: long-gone	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116782

Golden Spaceships Spacecraft look expensive. After all, many of their parts shine with a brilliant golden luster. But is all that glitters really gold? A listener's question about gold and spacecraft on today's Earth and Sky. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wednesday, February 5, 2003 Photo of Mars rover courtesty of NASA. DB: This is Earth and Sky with a question from Kenneth Phibbs in Virginia. He asks, "Why does NASA cover its spacecraft with gold?" JB: Kenneth, most of the gold-colored stuff you see is kapton film. It's a kind of plastic, with a very thin layer of gold on its surface and a layer of silver behind it. Spacecraft builders attach the delicate kapton to a tough fabric of fiberglass before wrapping it around the spacecraft. A Kapton-fiberglass blanket is about as heavy as a blanket on your bed. DB: This golden blanket protects the spacecraft from the sun's heat. The more solar heat protection a spacecraft needs, the more layers engineers add. The MESSENGER spacecraft, which is scheduled to orbit the innermost planet Mercury in 2009, would bake at 400 degrees centigrade with no protection. Ten layers of insulation will help keep it a little cooler than normal room temperature. JB: Gold reflects 99 percent of infrared radiation that falls on it, so some scientific instruments carry a very thin layer of gold plating to protect them from the sun's heat. Gold can be applied so thinly that light shines through it, so it's an excellent protective coating for glass. That's why the faceplates of helmets of astronauts on the moon shone like golden mirrors. Thanks for your question, Kenneth. And with thanks to the National Science Foundation, we're Block and Byrd for Earth and Sky. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Author(s): David S. F. Portree More information about this topic earthsky.com