San Francisco July 6 (IANS) Ahead of its August launch NASA s Parker Solar Probe -- the mission aiming to get closest to the Sun than ever by any human-made object -- has got its "revolutionary" heat shield permanently attached to the spacecraft the US space agency said.
The probe s heat shield -- called the Thermal Protection System or TPS -- was reinstalled on the spacecraft on June 27 NASA said in a statement on Thursday.
The reinstallation of the heat shield -- which was briefly attached to the spacecraft during testing in the autumn of 2017 -- marks the first time in months that Parker Solar Probe has been fully integrated.
A mission 60 years in the making Parker Solar Probe will make a historic journey to the Sun s corona a region of the solar atmosphere.
With the help of its heat shield the spacecraft s orbit will carry it to within four million miles of the Sun s fiercely hot surface where it will collect data about the inner workings of the corona.
The eight-foot-diameter heat shield will safeguard everything within its umbra the shadow it casts on the spacecraft NASA said.
At Parker Solar Probe s closest approach to the Sun temperatures on the heat shield will reach nearly 1 371 degrees Celsius but the spacecraft and its instruments will be kept at a relatively comfortable temperature of about 29.4 degrees Celsius.
The heat shield is made of two panels of superheated carbon-carbon composite sandwiching a lightweight 4.5-inch-thick carbon foam core.
The Sun-facing side of the heat shield is also sprayed with a specially formulated white coating to reflect as much of the Sun s energy away from the spacecraft as possible.
Because Parker Solar Probe travels so fast -- 69 2018 km per hour at its closest approach to the Sun fast enough to travel from Philadelphia to Washington DC in about one second -- the shield and spacecraft have to be light to achieve the needed orbit.
The heat shield itself weighs only about 72.5 kg NASA said.

--IANS gb/in/vm