Our recently published paper [1] presents a theoretical treatment of the degradation in performance of multilayer insulation (MLI) when there is a small amount of radiative transmission through each of the insulation layers. We present predictions of this degradation obtained by a skin depth calculation of the penetration of long wave radiation impinging on the thin aluminum layers used in this insulation. As a result, we predicted observable degradation in the performance of thinly coated MLI when used as a shield between cold objects such as shielding a 4 K object from a 77 K object.
However, as we pointed out in our paper, there are conflicting statements in the literature concerning the low temperature performance of MLI. So we arranged to have the transmission of a single sheet of MLI measured from 200 GHz to 1.6 THz. We recently obtained the results of this measurement and found,...
