Studies of Simulated Lunar Dust on the Properties of Thermal-Control Surfaces

Abstract

A study was carried out to examine several factors that can influence how dust can degrade thermal-control surfaces on the moon. The most important factor, besides how much dust covers the thermal-control surface, was the solar absorptance and, to a lesser extent, the thermal emittance of the dust covering the surface. Full coverage of the lightest and darkest dust degraded the of the surface by a factor of about 1.5 and 5.8 respectively. Silver-backed fluoroethylene propylene exhibited the least amount of degradation by lightest-colored dust, and although its fractional degradation for the darkest-colored dust was the highest, the absolute value of the was still lower than that of white thermal-control paint (AZ93) or aluminized fluoroethylene propylene. Neither illumination angle nor particle size (for particles less than ) were found to degrade the of thermal-control surfaces in an important way. The degradation in by complete monolayer coverage was much less than would be predicted from a simple rule of mixtures. Development of effective mitigation strategies will be essential to avoid prohibitive mass penalties for thermal-control systems that must work in a dusty environment.