For the last two years, tests have been conducted at Sandia National Laboratories' National Solar Thermal Test Facility to apply heat equivalent to 1,500 suns to spacecraft shields called Advanced Charring Ablators. The ablators protect spacecraft entering atmospheres at hypersonic speeds. The test facility includes a "solar tower" surrounded by by a field of hundreds of sun-tracking mirror arrays called heliostats. The heliostats direct sunlight to the top of the tower where the test objects are located.
The National Solar Thermal Test Facility is located on an eight-acre field of 220 solar-collection heliostats and a 200-ft.-tall tower that receives the collected energy at one of several test bays. A single heliostat includes 25 mirrors that are each four feet square. The total collection area is 88,000-square feet. Because the heliostats are individually computer controlled, test radiation can be a shaped pulse as well as a square wave in terms of intensity vs. time.
Test samples are mounted high in the receiver tower, and the heliostats direct the sunlight upward to irradiate the sample surface. The samples are mounted in a water-cooled copper plate inside the tower's wind tunnel with a quartz window that allows entry of the concentrated radiation.
Resource: Sandia Conducts Tests at Solar Tower to Benefit Future NASA Space Explorations, Sandia press release, September 7, 2005
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