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-20trade;, nano beta;-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 outgassingnbsp; Poly-Siloxane, Nano engineered filled Elastomers, andnbsp; ME Doped ZnO for Secondary Emission EnhancementProvide the Validated Dust Shedding TCMS coatings concepts for Thermal Control for durable long life and harsh space environmentsEvaluation and selection of low cost coating processing options, with the validation Data through GEO simulationProcess Lunar Dust Shading, Plasma Sprayed, Dense, and Tough TCMS for validation based on the PBT-20trade;/beta;-Alumina and Modified Doped Zn:LiAGOtrade;Validate selected candidate TCMS through Lunar Dust Simulation TestingRecommend and Process based on Validation efforts, the Reliable Material Systems for Lunar Mission nbsp;Demonstration hardware