Sunshield Technology and Flight Experiment for the Next Generation Space Telescope

摘要

The Next Generation SPace Telescope (NGST) requires a sunshield to passively cool the telescope and detectors to temperatures between 60 deg and 100 deg Kelvin. The sunshield is a large, deployable, multilayer thin-film membrane structure. Characteristics of this design are ultra lightweight, high packaging efficiency, high deployment reliability, low life-cycle costs, and a 5 to 10 years mission life at L2. A thermal performance, or e~*, requirement has been determined from integrated modeling. Performance of the sunshield is achievable, however, many hurdles remain. NGST is actively working to reduce the risk in the area of sunshield technology. Areas under study include: system deployment and stability, lifetime of materials, optical properties of materials, effects of micrometeoroid damage, and development of analytical models. An inflatable sunshield has been selected and included in the NGST yeardstick architecture. As part of the technology development effort, NGST is performing a flight demonstration on the NGST Pathfinder 1 mission. The Inflatable Sunshield in Space (ISIS) experiment is scheduled for October 2001 on the Space Shuttle. This paper will discuss sunshield requirements, technology development, component and system level testing, development of analytical modeling tools, and the ISIS flight experiment.