Speaker
Description
Dust is challenging in every planetary environment, especially for projects with high reliability and uptime requirements. This includes most lunar and Martian planetary missions as well as specific terrestrial missions, for example, helicopters.
The presence of dust causes accelerated degradation and a consequent reduction in the efficiency and lifetime of affected vehicles. This can, for example, include the degradation of optical surfaces, radiators, insulation or sensors, which consequently requires larger margins and redundancies. As a change produces more cost the later it occurs along a project path, it is beneficial to determine these design drivers and potential problems as early as possible in the process. A unified, standardized and easily accessible dust test facility would provide planners and designers with the capability to evaluate designs early on to reduce the risk of later design changes.
Terrestrial dust environments and testing procedures are already well established and are therefore used as a baseline for the unified testing environment. Despite the significant difference in lunar, Martian, and terrestrial environmental conditions, the requirements for initial testing may provide synergies. Therefore, state-of-the-art terrestrial test chambers and testing procedures will be evaluated and compared to test facilities for lunar and Martian dust testing. Procedures from established terrestrial testing are assessed on their transferability to other environments and requirements relevant to all environmental conditions.
In conclusion, the concept of a unified test environment and the possible adaption of terrestrial test procedures to simplify testing degradation effects on the performance of different components in different environments are presented. Test standards and current state-of-the-art test chambers will be compared, and similarities will be identified. It will be shown that a unified test bench can reliably reproduce dusty environments from terrestrial, lunar, and Martian locations with minimal changes and the use of different simulants.
