Spacecraft have long used heat shields for protection during entry into planetary atmospheres. Future missions to the outer solar system will need more sophisticated materials than currently exist. The extreme heating conditions needed to study new shield materials are, however, very difficult to achieve experimentally on Earth. Scientists working at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility at General Atomics (GA) recently developed an innovative approach that uses the conditions inside a fusion reactor for testing heat shield materials.
Click here for original story, Feeling the heat: Fusion reactors used to test spacecraft heat shields
Source: Phys.org