Speaker
Description
NASA is expanding the plans for the future of moon exploration, within the next few years, after the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, humans will come back to the Moon. The Italian Space Agency is actively contributing studying with Thales Alenia Space Italia technologies, materials and processes to ensure a safe exploration for temporary and permanent habitats on the lunar surface.
ASI is developing breadboards to test and characterize materials to cope with the extreme environment of the Moon. These breadboards include hatches and doors, MMOD (MicroMeteoroids and Orbital Debris) protections, MLI (Multi Layer Insulators), seals, windows et cetera.
All these breadboards are useful for a multipurpose module and help to build a crucial knowledge on the characterization of technologies that could be useful for deep space exploration in orbital and surface missions to protect human lives on the harshest environment. Several missions are foreseen in the next decades to build infrastructures to enable a permanent capability of surface lunar exploration.
A specific important role is played by the windows, which are crucial to provide awareness of the surrounding environment and are very important for psychological aspects as well. The new concepts for the windows are based on the use of polymeric materials for internal panes, while the outer pane will remain in fused silica. The essential search in minimizing the mass to be landed on the Moon forces the stakeholders to reduce masses in every single element; this approach based on acrylic also brings some other advantages like decreased lead time, simplified manufacturing and assembly procedures and minor costs. The window coatings will also be discussed, presenting the multiple possible stacking.
| Speaker Country | Italy |
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