Burnt char bone, also known by other names such as bone black, a black pigment already used more than 30,000 years ago in cave paintings will be used to coat the heat shield of the Solar Orbiter (SOLO) space probe. It’s an ESA mission in collaboration with NASA whose launch is scheduled for early 2017. Its purpose is to study the Sun from a relatively close distance of about 42 million km (about 26 million miles).