STAR facility

ESA’s Synergistic Temperature Accelerated Radiation (STAR) facility has been used to test the candidate Solar Black titanium coating for Solar Orbiter’s protective heatshield. STAR allows test items to be exposed to intense ultraviolet radiation in combination with electron and proton particle radiation, across an extreme range of temperatures (–150°C to +350°C), while in ultra-high vacuum. Based at the Materials and Electrical Components Laboratory in ESA’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, it is often used for accelerated lifetime testing.