Fabricate the Hub Trace a U.S penny to make a circle about 3/4 inch in diameter on a piece of corrugated cardboard. Cut out the circle. Fill in the corrugations with white glue. Set it on a surface that will not be damaged if the glue drips while drying. Let the glue dry before going to the next step. The "hub" in your model represents the central part of the spacecraft, where the solar sail blades connect to their articulation mechanisms. This is where they were stored rolled up, before inflating and deploying to their full size in flight. You'll find an image of this area of the spacecraft on a later page. On to the Next Step... BACK TO THE SCALE MODEL HOME PAGE

This file was encoded by the Zend Guard. In order to run it, please install the Zend Optimizer (available without charge), version 3.0.0 or later.

Seeing this message instead of the website you expected?

What is the Zend Optimizer?

The Zend Optimizer is one of the most popular PHP plugins for performance-improvement, and has been available without charge, since the early days of PHP 4. It improves performance by scanning PHP's intermediate code and passing it through multiple Optimization Passes to replace inefficient code patterns with more efficient code blocks. The replaced code blocks perform exactly the same operations as the original code, only faster.

In addition to improving performance, the Zend Optimizer also enables PHP to transparently load files encoded by the Zend Guard.

The Zend Optimizer is a free product available for download from Zend Technologies. Zend Technologies also developed the PHP scripting engine, known as the Zend Engine.