Dust Mitigation for Lunar Bearings

Goal: To measure the degree of dust infiltration in conventional bearing designs using best practices and assess new technologies with the capability to reduce infiltration, or increase dust tolerance to extend bearing life in lunar operations. Capability Need/Knowledge Gap: For extended lunar operations, mechanical systems, including rotating hardware, will be required to tolerate high levels of exposure to lunar regolith. Short-term bearing exposure to lunar regolith had mixed results in the Apollo missions. Some mechanisms fared better than others, leading to some misconceptions about the criticality of exposure in the long-term. Despite the misconceptions, bearing dust mitigation has been identified as a key technical challenge for extended lunar operations in NASA’s 2016 Dust Mitigation Gap Assessment. Many lunar operations subsystems were identified as being susceptible: EVA suit, pumps, motors, gearboxes, mobility systems, robots, and prospecting and extracting equipment for In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU). Key Technical Challenges: Increasing dust tolerance of bearings with a requirement to not significantly increase drag. Approach/Research Plan: (1) Identify key test parameters to simulate lunar dust ingress conditions (simulant and bearing selection, exposure rates, etc); (2) Design, build, install lunar wheel bearing simulator in relevant lab (SLOPE or Excavation) for SOA simulant exposure testing; (3) Identify dust mitigation concepts with high success potential and low negative impact to mechanisms; (4) Run simulator to determine dust ingress with current technology; (5) Build and test mitigation concepts to determine dust ingress; and, (6) Assemble test results from both rounds of testing. The project plan involves building a test rig to evaluate dust contamination in lunar bearing designs. The test rig will be used to quantify the severity of dust infiltration in current SOA bearings designs, and then utilized to assess enhanced designs aimed at reducing the level of contamination. The test rig is planned to be a small, stand-alone fixture that can be moved, as needed, into current GRC facilities. Next Step: Follow-on work would include vacuum testing of identified technologies that show promise as well as system level testing (ex. a bearing in a rover drivetrain).

Most prior work related to bearing dust tolerance focuses on preventing contamination, or measuring the detrimental effect of contaminated lubricant (ex. dust-seeded grease). Apollo-era experience, as well as technology gap studies, reveal that dust mitigation will be a primary challenge facing return lunar missions. Bearings, which are often exposed directly to the dusty environment of lunar regolith, are expected to be one of the most critically impacted. The proposed effort seeks to identify emerging and innovative technology and techniques with high potential for bearing dust management compared to the current state-of-the-art.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.