Speaker
Description
The Moon presents an extremely harsh environment for robotic and human exploration, with diurnal temperature cycles spanning nearly 300°C (-150 to 120°C). Active thermal control is widely regarded as a key technology to enable surface assets to survive the lunar night. We report on progress in the development of a compact and scalable, actively shuttered radiator, designed to be resilient to the dusty environment that will be encountered by many upcoming lunar missions, such as Argonaut/EL3. The radiator's function is influenced by extreme temperature variations, where thermal cases must consider solar input and IR heating from the surface during the lunar day as well as heat losses during the lunar night. An actively shuttered approach enables closure of the radiator to minimize heat losses at night and/or to protect the radiator from contamination during events with high expected dust deposition, such as landing, astronaut, rover, or robotic activities, or the passing of the day/night terminator.
To maximize functionality across a wide range of lunar scenarios, with an emphasis on polar regions including lunar landers, payloads, and rover applications, our approach has adapted a heritage shutter concept previously flown on Rosetta and Giotto missions. Over the two past years, we have validated new dust-resilient elements via component-level breadboard activities and conducted thermal vacuum tests on Engineering Model to correlate with our thermal model. An overview of the Engineering Model design is provided, highlighting thermal design choices as well as the thermal verification approach. This includes detailed results from the thermal vacuum tests, comparison with simulated load cases demonstrating the reliability and effectiveness of the radiator system under simulated lunar conditions.
