Judicious selection of materials, processes and preflight conditioning procedures provide a direct means of contamination control for spacecraft systems/instruments. Selecting low outgassing materials/processing and performing proper preflight cleaning and thermal vacuum conditioning can result in spacecraft hardware with a low intrinsic contamination potential. In an attempt to establish some quantitative effects of various processing/conditioning procedures, some recent Micro-Volatile Condensible Material and Vacuum Optical Degradation tests were performed. These tests established material outgassing rates and the optical transmittance of collected contaminant. Experimentally determined results are given which show the effect that specific material processing and thermal vacuum treatments have on outgassing behavior and contaminant vacuum ultraviolet (UV) transmittance.

Date Published: 12 April 1983
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 0338, Spacecraft Contamination Environment, (12 April 1983); doi: 10.1117/12.933639

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 0338:
Spacecraft Contamination Environment
Carl R. Maag, Editor(s)