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The objectives are to develop useful tailored coatings by attacking key challenges, including survivability through high temperatures and contamination from ablation products, in orto optimize performance and to maintain function long enough to significantly impact the total energy balance to the spacecraft. By locally generating large volumes of clean gas, these self-cleaning coatings will prevent contamination of useful optical components during the highly contaminating ablation process, and can be mass-efficiently sized to function only through the peak high-radiation pulse. This approach uses clean-decomposing low-char “blowing” materials in coatings, in order to reduce organic / soot deposition during the critical phase of high radiative entry heating. The approach taken addresses key challenges to control contamination with tailored coatings, including: added contamination or glass from coating decomposition itself, beyond the ablation products, delamination or flaking of the coating due to coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) mismatch between a coating and substrate during heating and cooling, a classic coating challenge, possible reaction between coating and substrate material (need protective layer), degradation in Space environment, including anticipated reduction in reflectance over time due to UV, and electrons and protons, outside of the atomic Oxygen in low earth orbit.
Experimental in-flight measurements of shock layer radiation are necessary to inform and verify both entry physics modelling and ground-based shock layer testing and simulation. Accurate measurement of shock layer radiation in-flight requires optical windows or deep portholes to protect sensors from entry heating. Windows allow a sensor a wider field of view, and positioned protected closer to the shock layer, but windows get quickly contaminated, or portholes can get partly occluded, by TPS ablators’ by-products entrained in the boundary layer gas layer.
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