NASA plans to shoot a projectile into Europa (one of the ice moons around Jupiter). The projectile will then send information about the ice to a satellite.
NASA designed this assembly to super chill ice.
They place one of our 12″ clear cylinders in the assembly. Then the assembly is put in a vacuum chamber.
They pump liquid nitrogen through the copper lines chilling the ice cylinder to -350F !!
They are testing different shape and weight projectiles.
The projectile is nestled into a sabot
The Sabot is placed into this air cannon which shoots it at over 700′ per second.
The sabot strikes the end of the cannon & the projectile continues.
A high speed camera records all of this
The -350f assembly is removed from the vacuum chamber
The crater formed by the projectile. At -350f ice becomes VERY hard.
Using a 3-D scanner, they scan it with 5 lasers from 6 angles.
Two of the individual scans
The computer merges all 30 laser scans into one 3-D model.
We supplied them with 12″ cylinders of clear ice frozen in Steel casingsWe helped NASA with a previous experiment as well. They shot Ice Bullets at various elements of the space shuttle in an effort to return to flight after the trajedy.
