  We present SHINeS, a space simulator which can be used to replicate the
thermal environment in the immediate neighborhood of the Sun down to a
heliocentric distance r~0.06 au. The system consists of three main parts: the
solar simulator which was designed and constructed in-house, a vacuum chamber,
and the probing and recording equipment needed to monitor the experimental
procedures. Our motivation for building this experimental system was to study
the effect of intense solar radiation on the surfaces of asteroids when their
perihelion distances become smaller than the semi-major axis of the orbit of
Mercury. Comparisons between observational data and recent orbit and
size-frequency models of the population of near-Earth asteroids suggest that
asteroids are super-catastrophically destroyed when they approach the Sun.
Whereas the current models are agnostic about the disruption mechanism, SHINeS
was developed to study the mechanism or mechanisms responsible. The system can,
however, be used for other applications that need to study the effects of high
solar radiation on other natural or artificial objects.
