Posted 01.04.2012 at 5:43 pm
6 Comments
Discovery's Heat Shield
In this file image, space shuttle Discovery does a belly flip for the ISS, so astronauts on the station can examine its heat tiles for damage.
NASA/Wikimedia Commons
Upon examining a piece of Attic pottery, certain words may come to mind: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” — and some would have you believe that is all you need to know here on Earth. But in space, you need to know a bit more. Like “how did this thing last so long?” Understanding how a Grecian urn survives for 2,500 years could yield improved ceramics — not for leaf-fringed scenes of deities or mortals, but for the sake of heat shields, and therefore safer astronauts.
Ancient Greek pottery remains quite robust, with perhaps 100,000 vases surviving two and a half millennia after their creation. Now the National Science Foundation would like to uncover the secrets kept by these foster children of silence and slow time.
Ceramics are vital to protecting spacecraft from the normal temperatures of Earth, the deep freeze of space, and the searing heat of reentry. Not many substances can handle the whole spectrum of stresses quite so well. The space shuttles’ underbellies were coated with black ceramic tiles to deflect heat, and they worked beautifully when they worked ... with the devastating exception of the shuttle Columbia, its heat shields damaged during liftoff. Better ceramics could yield better next-generation heat shields, not to mention other space components. So the NSF recently awarded $500,000 in grants to California scientists from the Getty Conservation Institute, Stanford’s National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) and the Aerospace Corporation to examine ancient Greek pottery in finer detail, PhysOrg reports.
Attic pottery gets its red and black coloring from oxidized iron, and researchers involved in the Getty project are using X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES) spectroscopy to determine the oxidation states in various vases and ceramic shards. X-ray absorption fine structure analysis will unveil the molecular structure of the iron minerals the ancient Greeks used, and potentially provide new solutions for space-age ceramicists. At SLAC, scientists are using a the synchrotron to illuminate further nanoscale details. Ultimately, the teams aim to figure out exactly how Greek artisans made their compounds and fired them, and produce some replicas of their own.
Karen Trentelman, a conservation scientist at the GCI who is leading the project, noted that ancient artists made these everlasting works simply using materials that came out of the ground.
“Something doesn’t need to be complex to be sophisticated,” she said. So true.
[PhysOrg]
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quote"Something doesn’t need to be complex to be sophisticated"
agreed !^^
"simplicity" is mother for "efficiency" ^^
---
bored? lets go mine the stars... ^^
I'm a huge fan of keep it simple stupid (aka KISS). Ceramics are amazing things. I had a girlfriend who's dad bought her a piece of a shuttle tile. That thing weighed almost nothing. I've seen video of one of the tiles being heated until it was white hot and when the flame was taken off, almost immediatelly, the person was able to pick up with bare hands and it was cool to the touch. I've never really thought of Grecian ceramic as tough though. I just assumed it mostly survived the test of time by sheer luck. I guess its possible though since I don't believe we have yet to be able to replicate Roman cement and that stuff is still standing strong to this day.
Science always asks "can we," but doesn't seem to ask "should we."
The problem with the shuttle was the fragility of its underside tiles and the carbon-carbon used in the wing leading edges. Besides these it required 5 other "heat shield" types, for a total of 7.
The next-gen US spacecraft like SpaceX's Dragon will make do with just 2-3, and they'll be much, much tougher both physically and in terms of the speeds at which they can re-enter. SpaceX's PICA-X can handle lunar & Mars return velocities - over 30,000 mph.
DocM
I have heard it said death begins in the colon.
Since the space shuttle program demise, now we are looking up its ass to understand longevity.
Alright then! ;)
.............................
Science sees no further than what it can sense.
Religion sees beyond the senses.
ANCIENT ALIENS
Hate to be a buzz kill here guys... but the thermal tiles did not fail when the shuttle was lost on re-entry! A piece of ice broke free from the external tank and punctured the leading edge of the wing, which is made of reinforced carbon-carbon. There are no tiles on the leading edge of the wings! What brought down both shuttles were stupid politicians and weak administators!!! First shuttle was lost because it was launched to meet a political event schedule and was well outside of launch criteria because of the cold. One engineer who pleaded to not launch commited suicide. Second loss was caused by the communist/liberal/enviromentalists who said we couldn't use the original insulation on the external tank because it is bad for the enviroment! Yeh, right, and 100's of tons of aluminum oxide is I guess. I've never been impressed with the depth of research at POPSI and this article is no diferent!