Advanced Survivable Thermal Control Material Systems for Aggressive Planetary Dusty Environments

This proposal is to fulfill the technology gap and provide validated products for durable, stable thermal control material systems (TCMS) based coatings that can be dust shedding in charging environments. The leveraging of the feasibility results for identified substitutes for the Low Out gassing PDMS TCMS for the Lunar Applications - available as a Charge Dissipating TCMS (NASA-CR-1998-208474) is proposed as dust shading promising low surface energy coating concept. The feasibility efforts concluded that the new coating has very low sticking ability to the lunar simulant dust and is a most promising candidate for the Lunar and Mars exploration hardware. The Feasibility study also investigated Dense Plasma sprayed Conductive and Secondary Emission Enhanced TCMS to illustrate the superb Dust Shading performance. The involved nano engineered material technologies at AMSENG are: PBT-20™, nano β-Alumina and the Micro encapsulation for the Secondary Emission Enhancement. Thus, the proposed phase II efforts can address the Scale Up and the Validation of the advanced dust shedding TCMS coatings products for the Lunar Environments through: Process Ultra low outgassing Poly-Siloxane, Nano engineered filled Elastomers, and ME Doped ZnO for Secondary Emission Enhancement Provide the Validated Dust Shedding TCMS coatings concepts for Thermal Control for durable long life and harsh space environments Evaluation and selection of low cost coating processing options, with the validation Data through GEO simulation Process Lunar Dust Shading, Plasma Sprayed, Dense, and Tough TCMS for validation based on the PBT-20™/β-Alumina and Modified Doped Zn:LiAGO™ Validate selected candidate TCMS through Lunar Dust Simulation Testing Recommend and Process based on Validation efforts, the Reliable Material Systems for Lunar Mission Demonstration hardware

NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) missions can greatly benefit from this dust mitigation thermal coating technology: all lunar-relating project - Power and Thermal Bus Sub Systems, and all projects involved with robotic science rovers and landers.

The Technology Developed can be useful for: Survivable Thermal Control Material Systems, Films & Adhesives that are hardened for the upper atmospheric man made or natural Nuclear Event Solar Storms and GEO, MEO & LEO survivable Products that can employ electron on demand strategies in products like: Hardened Thin Film Products, Wiring harnesses, Balloons

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