Recently ESA’s Critical Materials Technology (CMT) program to support the mission to Mercury named Bepi Colombo started to investigate novel high temperature spacer materials and processes. This work summarises some first results on the dimensional stability, temperature as well as thermo‐mechanical stability obtained on two high temperature polyimide foams (type BF 301 and type BF 502) as a potential candidate for the separation of the MLI layers. It is shown that the foams are possible candidates for the Bepi Colombo mission and so far it is expected that a possible use temperature is expected to be above 300° C. From the results obtained so far on the two materials it is also possible to conceive other space as well as ground applications.
An Investigation into Suitable High Temperature Spacers for the Bepi Colombo Mission
PROTECTION OF MATERIALS AND STRUCTURES FROM SPACE ENVIRONMENT: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference: Protection of Materials and Structures From Space Environment ; 2008 ; Toronto (Canada)
AIP Conference Proceedings ; 1087 , 1 ; 343-348
2009-01-05
6 pages
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
An Investigation into Suitable High Temperature Spacers for the Bepi Colombo Mission
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