Boldly going where no object has gone before - Tipperary company's role in historic space mission

A technology produced in Clonmel has boldly gone where no object has gone before.
All of the coating on the Solar Orbiter spacecraft that’s currently orbiting the sun was produced in Clonmel by Gortnafleur-based company Enbio, which has played a key role in the creation of the man-made object that has travelled closest to the sun, at a distance of approximately 44 million kilometres on March 26.
The protection system is often referred to as sunscreen for satellites and three local employees of Enbio were involved in its production - John Collins of Dundrum, Tom Guiry from Ballymacarbry and Joe Franey from Clonmel.
The Clonmel company’s involvement in the groundbreaking space-age technology is a source of pride to Enbio CEO John O’Donoghue.
“The two products on the Solar Orbiter are solar black, which was created from start to finish by Enbio, and solar white, on which we had some assistance from UCD,” says Mr O’Donoghue.
“Up to 80% of the coating on the Solar Orbiter was produced by Enbio.
“This includes the heat shield and the radiators, the high and medium gain antennae and the frames.
“The heat shield takes all of the battering from the sun’s radiation, which reaches a temperature of 550 degrees celsius on the surface of the heat shield.
“At the back of the heat shield the temperature drops to between 30 and 50 degrees celsius, which is the temperature of the water in an average shower. 
“The research was carried out in our Dublin facility and 99 per cent of the coating work was completed in Clonmel.”
The Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA.
Images taken during the mission will allow solar physicists to trace the extraordinarily powerful eruptions that take place in the corona, the sun’s upper atmosphere, down through the lower atmospheric layers. 
These images will also allow them to study one of the most puzzling observations about the sun: how the temperature is rising through the ascending atmospheric layers.
Usually, the temperature drops as you move away from a hot object. But above the sun, the corona reaches a temperature of a million degrees celsius, whereas the surface is only about 5,000 degrees.
Investigating this mystery is one of the key scientific objectives of Solar Orbiter.
The spacecraft is also recording data on the solar wind of particles that flows outwards from the sun.

Above: Images of the sun taken by the Solar Orbiter last month (picture courtesy of the European Space Agency)

Enbio was established in 2006 when it produced CoBlast, a technology to place coating on orthopaedic and dental implants.
In 2010 Joe O’Keeffe, one of the company’s directors who had previously worked with the ESA through another company in which he was involved, was approached by ESA about the possibility of providing the coating for the Solar Orbiter.
“By 2012 they had made four or five visits to us,” says John O’Donoghue.
“Globally, they couldn’t find another technology that could create the coating they needed.
“Our product was the fastest-qualified technology in the history of the European Space Agency. They needed our technology,” says Mr O’Donoghue, who has a background in biomedical engineering, is originally from Enniscorthy and now lives in Dungarvan.
He says that the Solar Orbiter coating is “a great shop window for what we do, it’s our Switzers window”, in a reference to the iconic Dublin department store.
“We put all sorts of functions and surfaces on metals to stop them from corroding and make them non-stick, such as frying pans.”
Solar Orbiter, which launched in February 2020, will complete up to 20 more fly-bys of the sun before its mission is completed in 2027-28.
At present it is examining the equator, or equatorial plane of the sun but on its last fly-bys will capture images of the sun’s north and south poles, which have never been seen before.
Another spacecraft, Solar Probe, is scheduled to travel even closer to the sun, before being eventually crashed into the sun once its mission is completed. 

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