Modeling of Spacecraft Outgassed Contamination Levels by Thermogravimetric Analysis

Outgassing from spacecraft materials is known to degrade performance of various components, of which particularly affected are cold and cryogenic surfaces. For those surfaces that suffer from performance losses due to molecular contamination, it is important to assess the contamination levels at an early stage of a project to apply necessary risk mitigation and/or risk avoidance. The focus of this work is on the reemission parameters of the molecular contamination model used in the simulations and improvement of the long-term predictions of in-flight contamination levels. This is realized by experimentally finding a number of sticking coefficients for a set of chemical species released from a contaminated surface during the thermogravimetric analysis. The predicted results are in good agreement with the experimental values.