500 Samples Exposed To Solar Radiation, Other Factors
Air Force Research Laboratory officials here recently partnered
with NASA to conduct materials experiments aboard the International
Space Station. The project incorporates 500 materials samples into
two suitcase-like containers attached to the exterior of the
orbital platform.
The containers are fully opened and folded back
to expose them to atomic oxygen bombardment, solar radiation,
extreme temperature changes, and other severe space environmental
factors. They will remain in that configuration until retrieved by
International Space Station astronauts and brought back to Earth
aboard a space shuttle.
Members
of the Laboratory's Materials and Manufacturing and Propulsion
directorates, working with NASA, the US Air Force Academy, Sandia
National Laboratories, US Naval Research Laboratory, Air Force
Office of Scientific Research, Boeing, the Space Test Program,
Aerospace Corp., deployed the sixth in a series of materials
experiments to the International Space Station via a space
shuttle.
The International Space Station provides a tremendous
opportunity to demonstrate and qualify promising new materials that
may offer weight, performance and cost savings benefits, and to
re-qualify existing materials, said Shane Juhl, an engineer at AFRL
and current program manager for the Materials on the International
Space Station Experiment program, known as MISSE.
"Due to the limited number of qualified materials for space,
manufacturers tend to build spacecraft using existing qualified
materials," Mr. Juhl said. "MISSE offers a cost-effective means for
testing new materials and requalifying existing ones whose
suppliers or processing methods have undergone change over
time.
"No single piece of equipment or facility currently exists that
can simultaneously expose materials to all the damaging
environmental effects of space," Juhl said. "In the laboratory,
samples can be exposed to only a limited number of simulated
environments at a time. In space -- the ultimate testing
environment -- samples are exposed to all the harsh realities of
the space environment at once."
Until now, the AFRL Materials and Manufacturing Directorate
staff has deployed only passive experiments to the International
Space Station (experiments characterized before and after
deployment). The ongoing mission, MISSE 6, incorporates eight
active AFRL experiments that collect and store data in real time
continuously or at set intervals for later analysis.
"The transition to more active experimentation will provide
unprecedented information about the on-orbit effects on material
properties of interest and will help reduce material screening and
qualification costs," Juhl said. "This will free up more funding
for mission-critical programs."
MISSE 6 is comprised of two containers and incorporates 40
samples from AFRL including the eight active experiments. Officials
say a seventh deployment is in the planning phase.