It is well know that the elevated satellite operating temperature causes the unused catalyst material in the Room Temperature Vulcanized materials (RTV) to volatize, which can then re-deposit or condense onto other spacecraft surfaces. In the presence of sunlight, this Volatile Condensable Material (VCM) can photo-chemically deposit onto optically-sensitive spacecraft surfaces and significantly alter their original, beginning-of-life (BOL) optical properties, such as solar absorptance and emittance, causing unintended performance loss of the spacecraft. This has been studied in vacuum environments simulating geosynchronous orbits, but never to our knowledge in atomic oxygen environments simulating low earth orbit. In this work we present an initial study of the effect of an atomic oxygen environment on the optical properties of previously photofixed material as well the effect of an atomic oxygen environment on the photofixing process. We will employ spectroscopic ellipsometry to characterize films deposited from the outgassing of DC93500, RTV566, SCV2590, CV2568 and SCV2590-2.

Date Published: 9 September 2014
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 9196, Systems Contamination: Prediction, Measurement, and Control 2014, 91960G (9 September 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2060872

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9196:
Systems Contamination: Prediction, Measurement, and Control 2014
Nancy Carosso; Joanne Egges, Editor(s)