EUROPEAN CONGRESS AND EXHIBITION ON ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSES - EUROMAT 2021

One of the newest European additions to the International Space Station (ISS) is the Airbus Bartolomeo payload hosting platform, attached externally to the European Columbus Module. This will provide an unobstructed access to the external space environment offering research opportunities for a wide range of space science applications. One of the Bartolomeo missions under development is Euro Material Ageing (EMA) – a joint collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the French Space Agency (CNES). This will offer recurrent testing opportunities for European institutes to perform materials science research and validate new materials technologies in the real space environment.
For the first EMA flight opportunity, 126 passive materials samples and 7 active detectors will be exposed in the ISS ram direction, offering unrestricted view to space for about 6 months. Various European research groups have been selected by competitive tender to fly their experiments. Materials to be exposed include novel types of multilayer insulation (MLI), optical and thermal coatings, reinforced composites, 3D printed polymers and exotic metallic alloys. All materials will undergo characterization of their physical and chemical properties before and after flight. CNES and ESA are also providing samples from their own internal research programmes, as well as standard reference materials which will be used as environmental monitors, to measure for example the atomic oxygen fluence and in-orbit molecular contamination.
In this paper, we will present the overall concept and design of the EMA, and we will provide a summary of the materials experiments, reference materials and environmental monitors to be exposed. We will also present initial results from some of the ground based testing performed to characterise the materials before flight. Finally, we will describe the potential opportunities for future EMA flights. The first flight is due to be launched to the ISS in mid-2023.