Posts Tagged ‘foil’
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July 7th, 2009
40th Anniversary of the Moon landings
Courtesy of NASA
Forty years ago this month the Apollo moon landing was completed and a man was on the moon. It seems a good time to remind ourselves of the critical role gold played in this project - the very visual use of a gold foil to protect the landing craft from solar radiation - a detailed explanation of the technical properties of gold that make it critical in these applications is given by this research paper in Gold Bulletin by Langley.
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March 9th, 2009
Gold Coatings for Space Exploration
The launch of NASA’s Kepler mission this weekend allowed me to see these great pictures of the spacecraft being constructed. As with most other space flight engineering, there is a good deal of gold to be seen! This gold foil appearance is generally representative of a thin gold coating on an underlying polymer substrate.The gold layer is required to protect the instrumentation from solar radiation - a detailed explanation of the technical properties of gold that make it critical in these applications is given by this research paper in Gold Bulletin by Langley.
Although this research paper dates from the 1970′s, it is still a great summary of why gold is so critical to space exploration.
Richard Holliday
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